"It is widely known that IE starts almost instantly because of of the DLLs it uses have already been preloaded by Windows apps (regular file explorer in particular)."

That's not my experience. It seems to lock the OS as it tries and grab some system-wide resources (DirectX?). The cursor stops moving and mp3s stop playing for a good half minute.

The same happens with Windows Explorer. Even Firefox comes up quicker than Windows Explorer.