{...} The other odd behavior is that, unlike previous installations of Smaart, this instance takes >1 min of looking at the splash screen before it’s up and running. {...}
IIRC, during its splash screen Smaart tries to talk to any audio device that the system has drivers for (just to check if they're working), so the more audio drivers you have installed on your computer the longer Smaart will take to start (or something like that).
-Russ