Comment 183 for bug 128803

a (small) part of the problem *might* be due to the recent documents? I have no idea if .recently-used.xbel is used during startup, but if it is, it is possible that it contributes to making the login time worse.

http://jeff.ecchi.ca/blog/?p=317

Examples of performance decrease because of this phenomenon:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=512108
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=500772