The initial loading shouldn’t take longer than 3-5 seconds. If the program is still black afterwards, it clearly has some issues starting up. 🙂
The Steam version shouldn’t differ much, although it needs to interact with the SteamAPI, which can add an extra layer on top of the system, which I don’t really have control of.
Hopefully you will be able to reduce the number of running ePics to one soon. Let us know how it goes! 🙂