Does your Pro Tools System take rather a long time to scan through your plugins upon launch?
Do you have an Antivirus application installed on your system?
If you answered Yes to both of these questions, something that may help you speed up the launch of Pro Tools is to exclude your plugin folders from your Antivirus application.
The reason some people experience slow starts from Pro Tools is that the Antivirus scans all files being executed or scanned by the OS in case they may pose a threat,
Everytime Pro Tools starts, It scans your plugin folders to check that nothing has changed and no additional plugins have been installed.
As long as all of your plugins are from a genuine source there is less of a reason to believe they will cause your system any harm and contain any malicious material such as a virus and should be safe to exclude from the Virus scan.
Obviously this will leave those particular folders unprotected but its a risk I am certainly willing to take in the name of performance.
In my choice of Antivirus application “Microsoft Security Essentials” there is a section where you can exclude certain file types or folders from virus scans.
I have simply chosen to exclude the following plugin folders:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Digidesign\DAE\Plug-Ins
C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Avid\Audio\Plug-Ins
This may well work for Mac’s too but i have not tried it myself.
Give it a go and see if it helps you too !