One of the important tools that you can download from Microsoft website is called BootVis.exe. this tool can help you optimize your boot time significantly. You would have to boot a couple of times to make this happen but I belive it is worth the effort. So here are some of the steps.

Step 1: Download this tool by visiting microsoft site at http://download.microsoft.com/download/whistler/BVT/1.0/WXP/EN-US/BootVis_file.exe

Step 2: Following is the typical windows snap shot of Bootvis.exe. Look at the left pane where you would see various check boxes. I have selected all of them. We can trace each of these checked activity/resource nextime system boots.

Step 3: If you want to create a New trace at Next Boot, you can do that from File option. If it is first time for you you may not need this option anyways !

Step 4 - TRACE: All right. You are ready to trace your boot sequence loopholes. Select Next Boot or Next Boot + Driver Delays and you are ready to go. Or you can jump to Step 5 and simply select, optimise the system.

After clicking on next boot you would see following window pop up:

After rebooting, this is what you are going to see. First you would see a small message saying that "please wait for bootvis to run.." and then you would see a small window saying that it is creating the trace file and window disappears as soon as it is done.

Step 5 - OPTIMIZE: If you decide to optimise the system, you would be asked for a system reboot as shown below:

System would reboot and BootVis application would be executed again. After rebooting, bootvis would be seen something like as shown below:

On my machine, it took sometime before finishing off. I think couple of repetitions should tune the booting sequence to optimized level possible.