Whenever I start the game, it takes a really long time ,over a minute, to load completely - just to get to the title screen. For a game running entirely from the hard disk this seems way too long.
My specs:
P4 3066mhz
1gb rdram
radeon 9800xt
winxp

I've heard reports on some machines taking up to five minutes to get to the title screen. Though, on my laptop it took about 45 seconds to load itself.
It seems that it may be pre-loading a lot of data on the initial start.

hm
glad to hear it's not just me
still seems excessive since everything's local

Yes, but it does seem to pre-cache the models and things for faster loading in-game. Loading is rather quick, even on my lower-end laptop once you get past that initial startup. I'll test it sometime soon on my quad-core.

Same for me. The game takes a ridiculous amount of time to load initially, but once I finish a mission it takes me back to the station menu instantly. There is almost no in-game loading...
I guess it's a fair trade-off.

I was thinking it took awhile also. I installed it to try help with some of the problems. The first load took some time. But each following startup took just a few seconds.
At a guess I'd say it caches on the first load. Some how.
Karl

I believe after the first load it's getting put into Windows' disk cache, so it's faster the second time, as long as not much has happened in between.
I believe defragmenting after installing the game will make things a lot faster. I'm using a fairly fresh computer (not yet fragmented), with a fast SATA drive, and it only takes a few seconds to load.

I've got almost the same specs as you, but my Radeon is 9600, and yes, getting to the Ascaron logo, and into the main menu takes about a minute. In-game loads are much shorter though.

AMD X2 5000+ (2.6Ghz)
2GB DDR2 (PC800) RAM
GeForce 8600GT 256MB
A very old ATA-100 Hard drive
My load times are around 30 seconds for the main menu and 15 seconds tops while playing. The longest load times are always when I jump into a races's system I haven't been to yet during that play session. The only tiime the game preformance suffers is when fighting inside the asteroid fields.
It would seem the difference in load times could be related to the installed RAM. Next time you play use task manager and see how much VM the game is useing.