I have posted in the forum for help but have not gotten anything that helped - I would love to find a way to see why. I know this is not the right way but I hope someone has an idea why and or how to find the problem and fix it.

Maybe a trace/truss could point out the cause of the delay (not my thing trying to understand trace/truss is beyond my knowledge) - my thing is scripting bash to do what is needed without input. I haven't code C in years (1988 was the last year and on 68020 based Unix).

https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/561075-Some-Applications-take-30-seconds-to-load-on-2-of-10-machines

I don't think it is the desktop as I loaded gnome and still had the issue

Background 15.3 with MATE desktop.

I have 10 nearly identical Dell 7490 laptops all i5-8350U cpu (different dates of manufacturing, different ram brands - all same spec, all with 1tb nvme drives - 2 of each the same ram brand and nvme brand)

on 2 different laptops - virtualbox and leafpad takes 30 seconds to load - running has no issues.

on the same 2 laptops - vlc takes 36 seconds to load - videos play fine as do mp3's.

I did an ldd and checked the sum of all the libraries on the good and the problem machines and they are the same.

One of the problem laptops is the one that I use to validate that my backup /restore code is good.

Since all 10 are clones of one another, I don't understand why the slowness - nothing in the journalcfg showing any errors.

the only hardware difference is the main laptop with the problem has thunderbolt usb3.1 the other does not have thunderbolt and the other thunderbolt laptop is fine.

Everything works but starting VirtualBox and VLC takes over 30 seconds.

I have tries everything on the internet to fix either one - deleting all files fir them in .config .local and .cache did not fix the problem.

All the setting on vlc that work fine - I rsynced to the main problem machine - no change.

Any ideas on how to find the slowness in loading?