If that was the reason, Francois would have recognized the same amount of time by starting from the console - wouldn't he?
It might have to do something how applications are started on kde by clicking icons.
Using fluxbox without any icon I can't help here - beside recommending fluxbox

.
Talking about performance: I saw CBuilder from Borland - a native c or c++ application I guess - and it's not starting faster.
I would like the startup-time of eclipse to be smaller, but after starting, it's reasonable fast on a 1.1 Ghz machine with 256 MB.
OK - debugging.
Did you see native GUI-Debuggers being faster?
[ December 21, 2004: Message edited by: Stefan Wagner ]