Intriguing. I made the image from an OS that I had been using for around 6 months. As you say most apps shouldn’t make a difference to the bootup process. In post 5 I show the Windows Task Manager, which shows most of what is running on that image.

Apart from the difference of what got loaded during boot on my system image maybe the 2GB pagefile helped your HDD? When I ran the boot up on HDD I had the pagefile set to be managed by Windows.