Yes, I'm talking about "verifying blocks" before program opens. I have quad core cpu, Q8XXX series 2.3 GHZ. PC is from 2007 but I occasionally upgraded parts. It was running great before, after new releases I faced this problem.
0.12 should do this faster, but I havent looked at the actual code to understand whether it need some special CPU instructions that might not have been around in 2007. I doubt it though.
Anyway, you can reduce the number of blocks that are verified on start up and the thoroughness they are checked with. Create a bitcoin.conf (if you dont have one already) and put the following lines in. By default it checks 2 days worth of blocks, 288. You can e.g. reduce this to 144 to only check on day worth of blocks.
Code:
# How many blocks to check at startup (default: 288, 0 = all)
checkblocks=288
# How thorough the block verification is (0-4, default: 3)
checklevel=3
