Can I turn off "VST scan" on start-up?

Reaper scans my VST folder on every startup, and for some reason it takes a hell of a long time (sometimes more than a few minutes). Can I just turn off this auto-scanning feature?

AFAIK, Reaper always does some sort of scan on start-up. Perhaps just to confirm the existence of the FX. That can't be turned off. After rebooting it takes about 8-10 seconds here. Subsequent starts take 2 seconds. I'm not sure what could cause the problem you've mentioned. How many FX do you have? Is it a normal hard -disk installation, for Reaper and the FX? You could, perhaps, try moving part of your FX folder to another location twmporarily and starting up Reaper. If it's faster then the problem lies in the folder/files that you moved out of the way.

I hear ya!!! If I'm starting a new tune and just have a few tracks...or working bringing up a stereo track master.....it just takes a second to bring up the song because there's only a few plugins....However, if I'm on track 9 ot 10 and have 25 or so plugins going....it takes roughly 30 seconds or so to scan the whole bunch.

Well, I was actually referring to just opening Reaper with no project loaded, at all. But after doing some experimentation, I see now that it was another application running concurently that was dragging Reaper down - 5 minutes 30 seconds to open, to be exact. So I'll be sure to turn off other apps before I start Reaper from now on. I now can get that above-mentioned 2-second start-up, can you believe it? I've been suffereing with this for ages!!