Slower background app startup than Win7

Hi, all. I've been on 8 for a couple of weeks, during which a few early issues have been ironed out through Microsoft updates, but I'm still noticing one of the problems that first caught my attention.
I've always enjoyed booting from an SSD (Force GT 120gb), but on 8, in contrast to 7, it seems like it takes quite a long time for all my background apps to get running, which is just what the SSD's supposed to alleviate. I'm running Stickies, Skype, three AHK scripts, Steam, MSI Afterburner, Google Play, Razer Synapse, Dropbox and AVG Internet Security 2013. It takes about 20 seconds from login for things to stop launching. During this time I can still do normal tasks, like open Chrome and Thunderbird, and these are responsive and generally act normally. That's the biggest thing that sticks out to me: when I was on a hard drive, I couldn't really do anything until all my background apps had finished launching.
Yes, that's a lot of apps, possibly too many, but the fact remains that there's a difference between their startup time on Win7 and Win8.
The pertinent parts of my system are the Force GT, an X4 965 at 3.9ghz, 8gb of 1333mhz RAM, a 2gb 6950 and a Caviar Green 1tb HDD, though as far as I know I don't use it at all on startup.
I have two questions.
1. Has anyone else seen a slowdown in the startup time of all your background apps on Windows 8?
2. What's the bottleneck in my system that's keeping my apps from starting up quickly?