We have some code that lives on a physical server. When a user launches Maya, some environmental variables (like PYTHONPATH) point at the code on the server. This ensures that users get all of our tools and plugins.
Now we want to migrate the code to a virtual machine. However, my tests show that this adds an extra thirty seconds to Maya’s launch and load times! I ran process monitor while launching Maya, and I noticed a lot of CreatFile events to C:\Windows\CSC. Specifically, the path is something like C:\Windows\CSC\v2.0.6\namespace\node-name. These events always result in a NAME NOT FOUND. The CSC folder does exist, and it is always empty when I check it.
Any idea why Maya is doing this? From some online research, I learned that Windows keeps files that are marked for being available offline in CSC.