Hello Kevin!
I had a problem similar to yours with my Dell XPS P133c. After 6
months of ownership, I noticed that the boot time got longer and
longer. From the time that "Starting Windows 95" to the log on screen
took 3 minutes! After I started noticing the length of time, I also
began to notice a time period (30 seconds to a minute) where nothing
seemed to be happening, just as with you. After close to a year, I
instituted the final solution, reformatting my hard drive and
reinstalling everything that I really wanted back on. What used to
take 3 minutes now takes 1 and no periods of inactivity.
Them's the facts. Here's the theory: I put lots of stuff on my machine
(VB 4, Office, SmartSuite,etc.) and I uninstall a bunch of stuff after
too. After a while, there are lots and lots of .DLLs on my system,
most of which are loaded into RAM at boot time, some of which, I
suspect, are useless. Have you checked out (or have enabled) the file
bootlog.txt? It shows you most every file loaded during the boot
process. It is very long! And what if the process tries to load a
particular file and the file is corrupt or needs another file that is
no longer present? The system might retry many times to load that
file... After a while, the boot process gives up on that file and
moves on.
My solution, before reformatting, would be to run RegClean or some
such and try to slim down your registry. Also look at config.sys and
autoexec.bat, win.ini and system.ini.
HTH!

Will Stephenson
mailto:[log in to unmask]

Anyone have any idea why the computer would do nothing for this period
of time?  It takes close to 5 minutes for my 200mHz Pentium to go from
pushing the "on" button to actually being able to do something.