Slow startup from network install

[BG - B. A. <BAr...@dy...>]

To ease the management of cream installed on 30 workstations, we decided
early on that we would see if we could just copy all files to a network
share and run cream directly from that share without requiring an
install on all systems on the network.  That seemed to go well, except
the time to load all of the files during startup was considerable: on
the order of 20 seconds before the user could start editing.  This was
unacceptable, so we had to ditch that approach and do local installs per
workstation, which is going to make upgrades a bit hairy.

Note: The network is 100Mbit, and the fileserver has plenty of
horsepower, so I don't think those are the bottlenecks.  I just don't
think Windows SMB is up to the task of delivering all of those little
files efficiently.

Is there a solution to this problem I am overlooking?  How can I easily
manage one copy of Vim+Cream *and* have it start up quickly?  Anything
five seconds or less would be nice.  What if all of the files were
merged into one, zipped together or something?

Ben