OK today I just wiped the HD and installed netbook Ubuntu via their page here,
http://www.ubuntu.com/netbook/get-ubuntu/download
So the only OS is Ubuntu. The install went fine as did the updates. I just let
it use the whole HD. Now it takes over 8 minutes for it to boot up! I even
used an online stop watch to confirm my estimates. The install made it's own
swapfile. BTW, there's 2GB of ram on this and the bios is updated to 1.50,
which is the latest. And no there's no settings for changing the speed on the
processor, but there was a setting for performance or battery, and it was set at
performance.

I've asked around in a couple of other forums regarding this. It matters what
people suggest, but I think the next step is to try a few other flavors of Linux
and see what happens.