Yep, just checked and it's the shaders which are eating up the processing time:
Code:
0.859 Loading resource 'Kohi_Diffuse.tga' 
1.000 Loading resource 'textureTest2.png' 
2.672 Loading resource 'textureTest1.png' 
4.359 Loading resource 'utilityLib/vertCommon.glsl' 
4.359 Loading resource 'utilityLib/vertSkinning.glsl' 
4.359 Shader resource 'skinning.shader.xml': Compiling shader context 'SHADOWMAP' 
4.422 Shader resource 'skinning.shader.xml': Compiling shader context 'LIGHTING' 
8.547 Shader resource 'skinning.shader.xml': Compiling shader context 'AMBIENT' 
12.687 Loading resource 'utilityLib/fragDeferredWrite.glsl' 
12.687 Shader resource 'skinning.shader.xml': Compiling shader context 'ATTRIBPASS' 
16.921 Shader resource 'skinning.shader.xml': ShaderLog: [Linking] 
Fragment info
-------------
(1012) : warning C7508: extension GL_ARB_draw_buffers not supported
Of course, that warning is somewhat worrying when we're using nVidia GeForce 6600GTs in these machines.. so I'm guessing it is a driver issue. We'll try get the drivers updated and see what happens 

[edit]
Yea it was old drivers.. we've updated to the latest, and we've got it down to 6 seconds in loading 

 and all the warnings have disappeared of "unsupported extensions."
We'll probably be writing a form of resource management soon anyway, so we can just dump everything into a PAK file and load that.