Before anyone tries to rope me in on the hardware debate let me say I'm using an Elitebook, quad core i7 with 8G ram and an twin SSDs - no hardware bottlenecks at all.

Now that we can put the rulers away; I'm having the same problem as the OP.

Gnome on FC17 takes ages to boot for me too, using autologin as well (all partitions are two factor encrypted so local login password is redundant)

It hangs for longer than normal on a service called plymouth-quit-wait.service

I've gooogled it and tried the suggested "disable" commands for this, but it still happens.

OP:  When you hit <esc> during boot, what is the last message you see?

There is definitely something here, when I've used ubuntu on the same machine in it's default configuration I've not had this problem, also it seems to have occurred after an update, the fresh install didn't hang like this.

I'm sure it's something real, and there will be a cause for this problem (other than the FOSS community and our love of resurrecting ancient hardware =] )

Michael.

http://mikelindner.wordpress.com