There was always a delay of a few seconds before the main program started. I found out why when I tried to write protected mode code myself: You could only as

There was always a delay of a few seconds before the main program started. I found out why when I tried to write protected mode code myself: You could only ask 4kb of memory at a time from emm386 (or himem, I forgot). There was no bulk access. So you had to loop trough the complete allocation in steps of 4k at a time. I think emm386 switched to protected mode, changed a page table, then went back to real/v86 mode for each block. When my code was written, it had exactly the same delay as other dos extenders.