New programs must be launched twice in 10.7.3?
This may be another case of Lion being a quiter. And utilizing OS X Lion's Auto Termination and additionally OS X Lions Sudden Termination feature. 


  Lion will quit your running applications behind your back if it decides it needs the resources, and if you don’t appear to be using them. The heuristic for determining whether an application is “in use” is very conservative: it must not be the active application, it must have no visible, non-minimized windows — and, of course, it must explicitly support Automatic Termination.


A program that is "taking to long to start" seems like a perfect candidate for the OS to kill.

Also it makes perfect sense for when you come back the second time and they start up, since Lion would have saved state on the program.