Has anyone considered prelinking ?
Will it make a noticeable performance difference for starting applications ?

Prelink: Normally the dynamic linker resolves library dependencies on the fly and maps the required libraries into memory. Prelinking computes these dependencies in advance and saves the results for later use.

Yes, including Nokia.
Not much. But anyway firmware should already come prelinked.
Not much means that for GUI apps same trick is used as kdeinit does for KDE so prelinking is not that critical for speed. It saves some memory though.

prelink is also in maemo repository (both 2.x and 3.x) so you can apt-get it and prelink system including your apps

Well I read today that SSU based tablets do not get the benefit of prelink. Debating whether to do a full flash on my tablet I started looking for prelink that I could run on an SSU based tablet. I found one for gregale but nothing for chinook or diablo. I'm guessing that the gregale version would work fine but I was wondering if anyone had tried it on a diablo based tablet.

I suppose if it doesn't work, I'll have to reflash thus solving the root problem.

Frank