Any way on God's green earth to disable resuming applications after a crash?

Using OS 10.6.8 Every month or two I'll have a hard crash on my MacBook Pro and I'll have to force reboot by holding down the power button. No big deal, I've been doing this on various macs since 1995 since OS version 7.1. What drives me absolutely bonkers in 10.6.x is that in certain cases like a hard power-cycle, OS X Snow Leopard insists on resuming all 20 or 30 applications I had running before the hard reboot. Is there some way to tell the OS just never ever ever (ever!) to resume my applications at boot time? I've done everything I can via system preferences and tinkertool of course. Please help! It takes literally 20-30 minutes for my computer to get up and going in some cases (16 GB RAM, tons of applications running) and if this happens while I'm with a client it's incredibly embarrassing. I just want a fresh start. Do I have better options in 10.7+?