Funny you should say that.....
I have UT on my WinMe PC and it takes much longer then I remember it loading. When I had UT installed on my Win98 PC (by the end of that time, the 4.25 patch just came out) it took under 20 seconds to load.
Since my hardware now is much faster than it was on the Win98 platform, the blame must go to WinMe or the latest UT patch (4.36)!
Is anyone out there having these same loading issue with UT that is using the 4.25 (or under) patch?