I just started up the game again and I happened to press the 'Esc' key, which for whatever mysterious reason shortens the load time to a second or two. Quite peculiar. I repeated that several times to see whether it was a fluke, but, no, that 'Esc' key surely does work wonders. *shrug*

Huh. Weird, but it really works. Also, it doesn't look like the game's missing anything because of this trick, so it's all good.

Wow this works perfectly, thanks a lot! It reduced the load time to pretty much zero.

Odd indeed, but it really works, ty.