[RESOLVED] slow bootup with nvidia drivers 3.xx and up

We sell Diamond Viper 550 cards in most of our systems. We have run into a problem where according to bootlog.txt, the video card drivers are causing a 30 second delay upon boot. The delay is very noticeable. When the system finally boots up however, the card performs as it should. There are long delays when changing color depth and resolution also. We have had the same problem with an Asus Geforce card as well.
We've used the Diamond driver 3.68 as well as various Nvidia reference drivers (up to 5.22) with the same problem. The only way we've been able get this to stop occurring is to use the Viper 550 with the old Diamond drivers (the .255 drivers) or the old Detonator 2.08, but this clearly does not help with a Geforce card from Asus, and we haven't been happy about using old drivers even with the V550.
This problem has occurred on various motherboards using various chipsets (Via MVP3C, Via KX133, AMD 750). It happens with various speeds of cpu's and has been occurring for many months now. It has happened with Windows 98SE as well as the first edition. We've use AGP drivers and IRQ
routers for all affected motherboards, as well as the latest bioses. It all seems to point at Nvidia, but we have no way to directly contact them. I tried sending them the support form on their site a few times but never got a response, and the latest drivers still have not fixed this.
I have the bootlog files that we made with this problem occurring as
well as a gif file showing the delay available on my website at http://www.datacruz.com/~amartin/nvidia if you wish to look at them.
These files were made with the Asus card installed, but using nvidia reference drivers and the exact same thing occurred with the V550. It's something either in nvmini.vxd or nvcore.vxd (which is the only thing between nvmini starting and successfully starting in the bootlog)
If anyone has had this problem and knows a way to fix it, please let me know either here or email [email protected].
Thanks a lot!
Andrew Martin
C&P Distributing Technical Support

I too had a similar problem that you are having and found a fix for my situation, but I don't guarantee it will work for you. This happened to me around XMAS last year up to this spring. I was building our beginner basic system that used either Celerons or the faster pIII's during that time. I used various models of the Matsonic line of motherboards that all used various Via chipsets. The main videocards at the time I used for these builds were either Diamond Viper 770 16mb agp (tnt2 chipset), Sniper2 32 mb agp (tnt2 mach64 generic) or an 8 mb Riva 128 zx chipset agp video cards. I found that Diamond viper 770 wouldn't even show a display on some of the Matsonic boards, Just the usual bios beep code of no display. I also found out that Sniper 2's would work just fine on Certain matsonic boards but would boot up slowly on others. Kind of like your situation. No problems with the riva zx based card but it wasn't really a 3d gaming card. I did some research about problems with via chipsets and tnt2 based video cards. Turns out certain older via chipsets (I.e. Via appollo pro) and their agp slots had certain incompatibilites with certain tnt2 based video cards. More or less to do with voltage and design of agp slot used for those via chipsets at the time. Sometimes, certain tnt2 and geforce based videocards can be very power hungry.
The only solutions I found to work was to get the latest bios's for the matsonic boards because that seemed to correct the many issues I was having. Another solution is to flash the video card's bios's if available. I also found they worked after waiting and getting the same models of Matsonic boards, but they all had a newer revision number on them. The only other suggestion I can offer is to try other tnt2 based videocards from different manufacturers (generic or namebrand) than just diamond vipers. In my past experience, diamond video cards are notorious for going bad and just aren't that great (except for their voodoo 2 models). We no longer use any diamond based videocards since they merged with S3.
Also, it isn't a very good idea to use geforce chipset videocards on Athlon boards using the AMD 750 chipset because of agp voltage and trying to properly run geforce at 2x agp without locking up the computer. The only fix I'm aware of for that issue is Nvidia's lastest reference drivers that set the geforce to run only at 1x agp on amd 750 chipset boards.
well I hope this helps you, but like I said before. I can't gurantee that they will.