Ben (26 Nov 2008) - From a brief look at the code, is seems that the firewall code looks for the current firewall profile using a simple sleep(10*1000) as a polling interval, as you suggested, which it tries WINDOWS_FIREWALL_FAILURE_RETRY times (which defaults to 60 itself) which is 10*1000*60 milliseconds, or 10 minutes. So, if the firewall is off, this would account for the consistent delay in startup.

Result - Start/restart HTCondor on Windows more quickly: WINDOWS_FIREWALL_IS_OFF=TRUE

Ian Chesal (23 Nov 2008) on statically linking C++: http://www.trilithium.com/johan/2005/06/static-libstdc/

Doug (16 Sept 2008) on remote dynamic linking: http://www.cse.nd.edu/~ccl/software/howto/remotelink.shtml

Uniform distribution of jobs across physical machines, discussed on condor-users in July 2008: https://lists.cs.wisc.edu/archive/condor-users/2008-July/msg00033.shtml

Todd (6 Nov 2008) on input files and $$: As of 7.1.4 pass --disable to condor_submit or add SUBMIT_SKIP_FILECHECKS=TRUE to the submit file