> generally not a good idea to turn off the configuration checking on login.
After some more experiments on both the old and the new machine it seems that the configuration 
checking option has no impact on the "Loading settings" step. Turning configuration checking on 
on the old machine does not make the login time longer, turning it off on the new machine does 
not make it faster.

I like Nik's idea with the SSH login but that will require some effort on my side to set up.

Janek