Thanks for you reply Silicon.
It's funny but as fate would have it, my laptop had issues shortly after and I had to do a restore of the OS.
After a clean install with little else, the startup time is still slow but I do not have slow issues when using windows explorer and right clicking on files, even right after a boot up so I believe it was a combination of a cluttered hard drive and Vista going a bit overboard with the indexing (which I have turned off at the moment) together with SAS.
I tried unchecking the setting for checking updates during application start in both the update and general tabs but that didn't seem to make a difference to the startup speeds. It's just annoying how the splash image stays on top of everything and I need to wait over 25 seconds for it to go away. But at the moment it doesnt seem to be affecting my speeds so I can't complain.
FYI It's a 32 bit version of Vista and I do have Comodo Internet Security installed as well but I had them both installed when it was the free version of SAS and I did not have this problem. Even after this re-install.
FYI It's a 32 bit version of Vista.