Lots of lag after selecting character.

After selecting my character from the character selection screen, I sometimes spend as much as 5 minutes waiting for the blue bar to START moving. The whole time this is happening, my HDD activity light stays on solid.
After the blue bar starts moving, I can get in-game and start moving around within 10-45 seconds (depending on how populated the area I logged out from is).

Windows 7
6gb Ram
AMD 2.4ghz Quad Core
4x 500gb SATA HDDs (Windows is on C, DDO is on F) -- these are all on different channels
NVidia 9800 GTX 768MB (newest drivers from NVidia)

My hard drive is defragmented. Background processes show no additional CPU or memory usage while this is occurring (had a performance monitor up for testing.) I generally do not have other applications running.

Has anyone else had this issue? Any ideas how to lessen load time?

I used to suffer the same problems, stuttering / lagging after logging in game for the first time.

I can see my environment around me, I can swing my weapons, but i just cant move. I also have a pretty high end rig.

Frustrated, I reinstalled, and that solved the problem for me.

Not recommending that you uninstall unless you really really can't stand it.