Delay in opening new programs at start-up

I have recently finished my new computer build, and it runs like a treat! The only issues I have is that at start-up, there is a delay before any program will open. My specs are below:
> AMD 8350 8 core @4GHz
> Gigabyte HD 7950 graphics card
> ASUS M5a99X Evo R2.0
> OCZ 120GB SSD
> Western Digital Green 1tb Hard Drive
> 16GB 1866MHz RAM
> Windows 7 64-bit
> 880W PSU

At start-up, all the programs listed in the start-up folder and MSCONFIG utility all finish launching a few seconds after logging in. However, I am not able to run any program such and IE9/Firefox/Steam/Inventor Fusion until around 20/30 seconds have passed, and the widget will not come up until the 20/30 second period. IOf I am to 'spam' the IE9 shortucut 10 times, after the 20/30 second period, 10 IE9's will launch immediately. I am completely baffled, and am wondering if anyone knows how to fix this.

What anti-virus are you running and is it configured to scan programs at launch?

It isn't, no but it is avast antivirus - the free version!

I run that too. On my laptop (has an led for disk I/o) if I disconnect the ethernet cable and reboot, I notice a LOT of I/o
activity even with the login icons present and prior to clicking & loging on. If I wait for that to stop (20-40 sec), the system is quite responsive. If I attempt to login asap, then system is sluggish until the aforementioned I/o is quiesced.

(Win/7 Pro 64bin 4gb ram).

Oh ok, so it is the antivirus? Thanks for this!

Not at all sure - - just reporting what I experience