How to pre-load my applications (with GUI) in Windows OS, before user authenticates?

Question

I am having certain in-house applications that we require to launch and keep ready in the PC before the user's logon, so that when the user enters the Windows login password, these applications will be 'pre-loaded' using the Windows OS setting and kept ready. We would like the pre-loading based on last successful authentication, or in a way that if those apps were open and running in previous session at the time of shutdown or sign-out, to be loaded in the background and kept when the user is shown the Windows logon screen. (Let us assume these applications require some form of authentication, but not linked to Windows authentication ).

Our goal is to minimize the waiting time for the user because presently these applications take around 2 minutes to open and there are around five such applications. These applications are opened from a network path which resides on another server. (These applications are based on VB .NET.)

We have checked the setting "Automatically save my restartable apps when I sign out and restart them after I sign in" and another option "Application Recovery and Restart", also this setting is for recovering applications after an exception is encountered. It seems that the former is applicable to our case but we are not exactly sure. As these are interactive application, Task Scheduler is not an option and running these applications as a service is also not feasible as it runs in background and do not show any user interface.

We came across a forum question where the user also mentions a feature which points to "pre-loading" of applications. Looks like the what the OP wants to disable is actually what we would like to enable! Is there any such default setting in Windows 8 or Windows 10 that pre-loads the applications?