But that still wouldn't solve his problem of the boot process being delayed (which is quite curious BTW).

Well, if your SIM card is not being recognized properly.. wouldn't it be a good idea to just remove it? (wlan and bluetooh will still work, i.e. built-in "tablet mode").

Otherwise you might have to blacklist a bunch of modules as well as disable a number of services being started during boot.

Having no experience for this particular task, I cannot help you more. I'm about to receive my third N900 (thanks @Estel , and I'm not buying a 3rd SIM card, so I might just try to see if I can uninstall/deactivate everything related to the SIM card.. even though it's obviously not necessary because there won't be one , but just for the fvck^H^Hn of it it might be an interesting exercise

If I do manage to get some useful information I'll post it here.