[badaas]

I does appear to be faster at startup with the link to skinhelper badaas posted, by that I mean the initial time it takes for the media counts to appear. It's as if something is blocking that process but hard to determine exactly what. When I get time I'll try and set the skinhelper addon to debug level logging to see if I can figure out what's going on. The widgets also do seem to take longer to load with the versions after the one linked by badaas.

Did you change something to your skin perhaps ? Remember that the more plugin requests you do at the same time, the more you are utilizing resources and there's even a chance the python interface gets blocked. I have never seen documentation of the limitations but I'm pretty sure that there are some limitations if there are many python scripts running.

In fact, widgets should load faster since recent versions because I restructured some slower code.
Maybe the caching is failing at your side? If you issue the reloadskin command, the widgets should be refreshed in a second or so.

1 example i have.
Using helper i linked in movies library with view dv flex for example, running image poster process/tomato rating/cast list etc it loads instant also the dialog video info loads fast.
With new helper there is a consistent 3sec delay to load cast/fanart poster effect etc. and to finish loading dv info properly, ie. Info screen with blurred bottom bar takes 3 seconds to load.