Extremely slow boot time and unstable VPN connection

[pangel]

Hi, I asked two questions on the Ubuntu support forums a week ago and no one
seemed able to find what was wrong with my system. So I'm trying here.

First problem: Extremely slow boot time
"I just completed a fresh install of Ubuntu on my laptop (dual boot with xp)
and it takes about 3 minutes to boot past grub (while windows still boots in
about 20 seconds)." (bootchart url: http://tinyurl.com/2olop7)

Original post (with dmesg log and another bootchart):
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=711122

Second problem: VPN connection unstable
"My VPN connection breaks every 5 minutes. I'm connecting to a Cisco
concentrator (on a university campus). The problem is the same whether I use
vpnc or the proprietary software vpnclient.

There is no such problem when I dual-boot on windows xp, so I assume it's
not a connectivity issue.

Both vpnc and vpnclient do not notice anything special - firefox just starts
hanging on "Looking up for server.tld" and ends up with a "Unable to find
the proxy server" (I use a proxy to access Internet through the VPN
concentrator, but when the problem occurs I can't access the local network
of my concentrator either).

Killing the processes and reconnecting to the concentrator always fixes the
problem for 5 new minutes.

I'm connecting with an ethernet cable (if that matters). Also, this is a
fresh Ubuntu install and I did not change any route configuration or
anything."

Original post: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=711844

---
Since then, I made other several attempts to solve my problems but no one
succeeded - and I did not find any extra information about what could be
wrong.

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