I've been wondering, what's with the start time? If you have a lot of girl packs added in, the time builds up so quickly. Sometimes, the game crashes before you get the girls in....
First, if the game crashes, then there is a problem with one or more of your girls files.
The game has to load into memory all the girls files so it can access them without having to load them every time they are needed, this takes some time.
I will see what I can do to reduce the time.
I ran procmon on my game and found that I can probably reduce the time a few seconds by checking if the game should look for .ani files before trying to load them.
It currently tries to load every image.ani type even if there are none in a girl's folder.
By checking if any ani exist instead, it should save a few milliseconds per girl, possibly saving 5-7 seconds per 1000 girls files.
Its not much but every second saved will help.