Moving ~6,000 screenshots and a hundred or so other files out of my WoW directory makes no noticeable difference to my load times (~1.75 minutes).

Disabling all addons however drops loading to about 10s total :o

Load time in this case referes to the time it takes to start WoW, not to log into the game world.

Ok, I have a follow-up question or two. I removed a huge portion of my addon folder (inactive addons, old backups etc.), and this vastly reduced the time it takes me to boot up WoW - thanks very much for this tip. However, when cleaning my add-on directory, I noticed that I seem to have all the Ace libraries in triplicate.

For instance, I have:

/addons/ParserLib
/addons/LibParser
/addons/!!!StandaloneLibraries/ParserLib

I assume this is due to the placement of ace libraries having been changed at various times, and so now I have excess copies that are obsolete. The question is, which ones? The /addons/LibParser one seems to be the highest version number, and that's also where the more recent Rock libraries are, but I wanted to check before I clean out the others. Are Standalonelibraries/somethingLib and /somethingLib no longer used?

Secondly, you mentioned that having a lot of screenshots can slow load times too. Are you meaning screenshots in the addon folder, or does WoW index it's entire directory structure on load? I have a HUGE number of screenshots in /screenshots/, should I remove these too if I want to optimise the initial load time?

Ah, all right, sorry for misunderstanding.

No issues with the WoW client loading speed, world entry is my bottleneck.

If you use WAU, just nuke all of them then update with automatic dependency fetching enabled.

The entire WoW directory is indexed, including screenshots, old patches, and whatever other crap you may have lying around.