Extremely long boot time (>20min), Win7 Ultimate clean install.

About 2 weeks ago I decided to bite the bullet and update my desktop from XP to 7. I did a complete reinstall after formatting my HDD. After the pretty quick and painless install the computer was taking a ridiculously long time to boot up, in excess of 20 minutes. I've read up on other threads that recommended that I do a reinstall of windows and upgrade my RAM. After 6 or so re-installs and upgrading my RAM to 4Gbs (The most I can do considering my x86 processor) the problem persists. After the Win7 loading screen the entire screen just goes black, no blinking underscore in the top left or anything like that, but the screen is still on and backlit. There's no cursor and the keyboard doesn't even respond to the NumLock button being pressed. I then have to wait for the PC to go into hibernate/sleep, when I press the power button after that to wake it up again the login screen is there like nothing was ever wrong.

Gigabyte motherboard
Samsung 300GB HDD
2x2GBs DDR2-800
Nvidia 8600 GT Graphics
ESI MAYA44 Soundcard
LG DVD RW

I've tried taking out all graphics and sound adapters to no avail. Please could you help me? I've run out of options now. Thanks. :)

Hello squidofsymphony and welcome to Seven Forums. (Cool name BTW!)

I'm not an expert at anything but you might try going through this tutorial on startup repair.

Startup Repair

Also, one of our Forum experts prepared a couple of troubleshooting tutorials for boot issues and general problems.

Troubleshooting Windows 7 Failure to Boot

Troubleshooting Steps for Windows 7

Important to note that none of the troubleshooting steps will repair hardware issues like a failing hard drive, bad RAM, etc. But the guides could certainly help to rule out issues and help isolate the root problem. Please post back the results of your troubleshooting.

Where did you get Ultimate? How is it activated?

You might have boot sector corruption remedied by Startup Repairs suggested above, however it would probably be best to start over and wipe the HD with Diskpart Clean Command.