[X4U] Strange Startup Pause

[Neil Laubenthal]

Hello, wondering if anyone has seen a similar symptom to my startup pause or have a recommended solution.

I'm running a unibody MBP with 10.7.1 booting from an OWC SSD drive and my startup time is way over a minute. Network connectivity is via a static IP to my 802.11n Airport Extreme. What I'm seeing during the startup is

-startup chime
-5 seconds of gray screen
-70 seconds of gray screen with the apple logo and the rotating cursor
-color background changes to a slightly warmer gray (like the video driver kicked in) for about 5 seconds
-login screen

Based on a suggestion I had on the tidbits mailing list I did a verbose boot and I' seeing a line that says:

Airport: RSN handshake complete on en1

followed by the 70 second pause then the startup sequence continues with the login screen in about another 10 seconds.

I'm trying to figure out how to fix this in the easiest way.

I did a fresh install of Lion on an external FW800 drive and the pause is not present. When I use Migration Assistant to move my user account and associated home directory over the pause returns . . .so it looks like it's something in my home directory causing the issue.

I have captured the output of the verbose startup and can post it if anyone thinks it would be useful . . .

There doesn't' seem to be any other issue with the machine other than the startup lag; the last time I did a clean install was in the Leopard days so 10.6 and 10.7 were upgrade installed over the past 18 months.

I'm leery of just wiping the drive and reinstalling since the problem appears to migrate with my home directory (although I don't see how something in there would cause a delay in startup since the laptop does not login automatically and my normal account is not an admin account. Wiping/reinstallation and restoration of my home directory from Time Machine or a clone doesn't seem like it would do much good.

Has anybody seen anything like this or have a recommendation  . .or is it just time to bite the bullet and start over without migrating my home directory . . .although that would be quite a pain I don't have any other brilliant ideas at this point. I guess I could clone the SSD to an external and try it . . .the worst that would happen is that it won't work and I can clone the original OS/Applications/Users back and live with it. It would take me 3 days to reinstall Office/Photoshop/everything else and I'm trying not to go down that road unless I have to since it means redoing my iTunes playlists, iPhone/iPad configuration, Mail configuration, etc . . .not to mention having to find all the right serial numbers again.

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There are only three kinds of stress; your basic nuclear stress, cooking stress, and A$$hole stress. The key to their relationship is Jello.

neil