Nothing has really changed with startup or load times. The 'syncing for key level' is a new indicator showing that this is happening. VaM was always doing this sync in previous releases, but there was no indicator. I received feedback that activating a key on an install that included a lot of addon packages was handing the application a long time and it was not obvious that it had accepted the key. So an indicator was added to show this.
Each time VaM loads, it validates your key, and if you have a key that supports addon packages it loads the packages. It is this process that can be lengthy to execute on startup and not something that can be improved at this time. If you have a lot of addon packages it will take longer.
You might check to see if you changed you cache settings. If they are off or set to a new directory, initial caching of images used by a scene can take some time. Once cached, new loads of that same scene should be much faster.