  In some flares the thermal component appears much earlier than the nonthermal
component in X-ray range. Using sensitive microwave observations we revisit
this finding made by Battaglia et al. (2009) based on RHESSI data analysis. We
have found that nonthermal microwave emission produced by accelerated electrons
with energy of at least several hundred keV, appears as early as the thermal
soft X-ray emission indicative that the electron acceleration takes place at
the very early flare phase. The non-detection of the hard X-rays at that early
stage of the flares is, thus, an artifact of a limited RHESSI sensitivity. In
all considered events, the microwave emission intensity increases at the early
flare phase. We found that either thermal or nonthermal gyrosynchrotron
emission can dominate the low-frequency part of the microwave spectrum below
the spectral peak occurring at 3-10 GHz. In contrast, the high-frequency
optically thin part of the spectrum is always formed by the nonthermal,
accelerated electron component, whose power-law energy spectrum can extend up
to a few MeV at this early flare stage. This means that even though the total
number of accelerated electrons is small at this stage, their nonthermal
spectrum is fully developed. This implies that an acceleration process of
available seed particles is fully operational. While, creation of this seed
population (the process commonly called `injection' of the particles from the
thermal pool into acceleration) has a rather low efficiency at this stage,
although, the plasma heating efficiency is high. This imbalance between the
heating and acceleration (in favor of the heating) is difficult to reconcile
within most of available flare energization models. Being reminiscent of the
tradeoff between the Joule heating and runaway electron acceleration, it puts
additional constraints on the electron injection into the acceleration process.
