Those are all things that could help the loading time. I am not sure exactly how it works currently, but those are things to consider.
Hi, got Gish a few days ago, great game, but it takes me huge amounts of RAM (on Task Manager it says, Mem Usage: ~300 000K and VM Size: ~ 380 000K).
Also there's quite an heavy CPU usage when Alt Tabbing, maybe you could sleep the thread while the window is minimized or something, because I can't do anything when Gish is minimized/alt-tabbed
Gish uses a bit of memory, not much you can do when task switching about that. The heavy CPU usage can be fixed though.
That really is an enormous amount of RAM. Do the intro, story and ending screens remain loaded the whole time? What about the animations for enemies not present in the current level? And is it really necessary to make the background textures so huge when there's no detail in them? I suppose the OS should be able to page out the unused stuff effectively, but I don't really trust it to get it right. (Mind you, I register about 200Mb-ish here, not 300Mb-ish.)