One thing that makes the boot up time much slower under OS 2008 over 2007 is the startup greeting (the jingle and hands screen). There seems to be a several second delay at the end of it that was not there before. Fortunately, it can easily be disabled in /etc/osso-af-init/

You can see the difference simply by running the app standalone from xterm by running /usr/bin/osso_startup_greeting.

I disabled it without any problems.

On another note, I'm pretty sure the lockups are related to the keyboard issues as I previously posted. I've played with this for a while now and can see that the mouse clicks are being rejected because they are coming with 'modifiers' (that is, keys held down). That is also why some letters are in CAPS and some are dupes and some cannot be typed at all. Hope this fix this mess soon.