does remastering improve load time?

[smiley]

The initrd for tc is pretty tight, but you might also be able to see some gains if you reconfigure the kernel that you're re-mastering with.  If you're looking for pure boot up speed, you can remove any support to hardware that you're not going to use as well as picking specific support over the generic options in the config (eg. using P4 over 386 if your using a machine using a P4.)