If I start minion there will be the minion window showing me a loading bar with information what it is currently doing.
It will take about 3-5 seconds until you can see this information but it will never just use 10 seconds in the background and then, all of sudden, you see your list of addons.
Sometimes it takes more then 5 seconds until you can see the minion window coming up, thats right. Depends on the workload of your pc and the CPU power I guess.
Are you using the most current version of Minion?
It should look like this after double-clicking the minion icon or clicking a minion link:
I think you should just click the icon and wait, do something else in that time. Like start the eso client and login