It takes a while for my VLC and Winamp to start?

It takes like 4 seconds for my Winamp to start. And for VLC, the video will play instantly but it takes like 4 seconds for the audio to kick in. And at the start the video gets distorted.
My recently purchased computer has 2.9 GHZ and 8 GB’s of memory RAM.
Answer #1
A few things spring to mind:
Maybe the exe or dlls are UPX compressed? – Uncompress them, they take up more hard drive space but start faster.
Maybe they are being AC checked each time they get opened (couple that with exe compression and AV’s take double the time to check)?