is there a windows profiler that i can use on microsoft binaries to see what the hold-up is? I think 15 years ago i used valgrind and i cannot remember for what. Either way, there's a ton of stuff i want to report, either to microsoft (they won't care), but the internet might.

i've managed to track down powershell in windows terminal taking forever to fully launch down to "100% gpu usage in the powershell process", but i'd really like to know what it thinks it's doing.

also: 4 seconds to blank document in Word. the splash screen is most of that. notepad++ ~2 seconds. notepad.exe slightly over 1 second before the text content loads. Edge: 2 seconds to page render from startup. Oh and powershell loads instantly if i switch to the "old" terminal, but the old terminal doesn't have tabs, so that's a non-starter. "forever" above means 45-60 seconds.

The splash screens usually "hide" various loading steps. In Excel it's often loading and initialization of various extensions, for example.