@seanmcken,

The N900 does not do actively anything to artificially slow-down the boot process (I think that's pretty obvious, but anyway).

Meaning: if you want to make the booting faster, then you need to stop the N900 from loading something. Meaning you have to uninstall that something.

I gave you a few examples (camera-ui, nokiamessaging, calendar). Obviously removing those programs will remove that functionality as well, so it's up to you to decide what's important and what's not.

If you want to experiment for yourself (have the flasher and USB cable at hand though), have a look at the directory /etc/event.d.

There you have the scripts that load/do stuff during booting. Have a look at the stuff there and see if there's something you might not need.

You also have the /etc/Xsession.d directory. The scripts there are run once X is running.