Good news: the startup time is largely fixed on PowerShell 3 (Windows 8). Most of that startup time ends up being PowerShell trying to load all of the snapins on your system--and you can have a LOT of them if you're a developer, since there are snapins for IIS, SQL Server, and remote management that come more-or-less out-of-the-box in that scenario. PowerShell 3, rather than actually loading all of these, simply notes what commands they export, and only bothers actually loading the snapins if you actually use them. Up side, PS on Windows 8 takes less time to start up. Down side, commands occasionally pause a second while PowerShell loads whatever snapin happens to have the commands you just tried to use. This ends up being a pretty good trade-off in my daily work, though.