I almost bought the 240GB version of that exact model last month. The only reason I didn't is that I really don't need it.
I'm stumped on the startup speed though. Sounds like you've covered the basics. That should be as fast or faster than my system. I'll keep it in mind. I often walk away from a problem like this and then an idea pops into my mind randomly, a couple hours later.
In an older system, asking the amount of memory would be among my first questions, but I'm guessing you have 4 GB or more, so that's not really a concern anymore. Memory errors would be a possible cause I suppose, but I doubt it. To be safe you could run memtest. I've seen stranger things cause seemingly unrelated problems, so I wouldn't rule it out completely.
If you figure it out, let us know what the problem is.
