Startup time improvements - may break things at first

This is the first out of 5 fixes towards performance/startup improvements planned for Q4. As always, such things bear high risks, so please report anything strange you may notice. Difference in startup time should not be very noticeable - it is approximately minus ~10%, so just 1-2 seconds less than it was before. But the most important part is that this fix opens up additional time-saving options which I will exploit in the nearest future.