30-Second Delay on Welcome Screen

I just loaded Vista Ultimate x64 on a new system (e7200, 4GB Ram, Gigabyte mobo, etc. - a fast system). It boots fine until after I enter my login password and the word "Welcome" appears. This lasts for exactly 30 seconds until the screen goes briefly black and the desktop (quickly) loads. This seems like a really long delay on the welcome screen. Is this normal Vista behavior?

Have a look in the events log to check what happens during this time.
(Administrative tools/Events viewer/Windows/System)

On a newly built/installed machine things will work slowly at first. This is because of indexing and other things going on in the background.

There are tutorials on this website that may help with the speed of your system;

Superfetch - Change Preload Data
Speed Up the Performance of Vista

I hope this helps.

Yes Roy, you're right, but indexing, prefetching, etc.... run really once the desktop is on

Are you sure. Prefetching starts when vista starts to load. (boot files). Indexing not sure about.

Well, this morning it now takes 3 seconds...more like what I expected. Yesterday it was consistently 30 seconds on the Welcome Screen. The only thing I changed was to set the resolution back to 1024x768 and DPI back to 96. I can't see how that would be the issue, but who knows?

The events log my friend
Have a look!

As far as I can tell, looking back to yesterdays events, it appears the delay was coming from a wait for the DHCP client. Sometime yesterday, I was suspicious that it could be an IP connection issue, so I created a fixed IP address for this machine to connect to the router. I still saw the delay after a few boots though. The DHCP delay warning is not showing up in today's event, however...
Thanks Sid.