OVERTALK,
It's just another MS irritation and not insoluble by any means. My Intel PIV machine is just so slow to boot into (and out of) Win XP Pro that each attempt wastes 5 minutes. When you're busy, that is a bummer.
For testing purposes, pull the ribbon from your CD-ROM Drives and see if that speeds up your boot time to under a minute.
Let us know what happens and then we will take it from there.
Take Care,
Richard
P.S. As for the keyboard, you need to have your Primary VGA set to PCI in the BIOS so that the PCI bus will be energized before the boot process. That way you will have USB Functionality. (I know, no help with your current problem though.)