RESOLVED.

Seems that something on the hard disk that for some reason was loaded even while booting from CD was causing the problem. Now it seems slow, but just because I'm used to faster computers, and the boot times are back in the 1min 30sec range.

Gonna grab a cheap CPU upgrade card from eBay for this baby... upgraded the HD to a super-quiet 30gb one instead of the loouuud 10gb one that was there.