Tom Black

I believe #3 is expected behaviour and part of the inventory update.

Confirmed: See "Inventory Management" here http://www.minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Version_history#Improvements_.26_Changes_2

He says the period of time the Mojang splash is up before the main menu loads is half as long when he deletes the logs from the .minecraft folder before loading the game... this is without any mods.

Connor, are you certain that text logs are causing the extended delay? What sort of time difference to you get when you delete the logs from the folder? Did it get slower after a particular update? Are you using any mods?

The issue I believe is being reported is that the characters are separated when Arabic is displayed with essentially zero kerning (see the examples at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_language#Examples )

It's worth bearing in mind that Arabic script is the second most popular script after Latin, so this isn't necessarily a "single language" issue.