Tried both ."exe " - no differences in load speed were found. The speed is the same as the standard OXCE+ latest version.
CPU Intel Core E7500 so what will... I have on this CPU World of Tanks and a Perfect World - just fly like swallows. No brakes, no lags, no traffic lights. And for openxcom it may lack performance? Not believe!
Yeah, well, the CPU is almost identical to mine wrt OpenXcom. Something's killing I/O and it isn't OpenXcom code, because, well, there isn't anything in it that could.
A clue can be extracted from watching what's happening during a savegame load with something like
process explorerLike, what processes are eating the CPU during the load. I think even the stock task manager can do it, or at least show if CPU usage spikes, and that would be a useful data point, but I'm no windows expert.
I don't actually believe that even a batshit insane antivirus pile of crap can slow down reading a simple text file even if it's 5Mb. I can believe that an antivirus can slow down the startup, since that's when a ton of files get read/parsed. But not on a savegame load, where it's just one file, whatever its size.
And since you say WoT behaves nice enough, then it's probably not a hardware problem.
Still, no ideas on what could be the problem in OXCE+ code. Please look into what's going on in the system when you're loading a save. You are literally the only set of eyes we have on the problem.