K8N-Neo2 Platinum pauses for 25 sec at boot, nvatabus.sys the problem?

Question

All,
After POSTing normally and starting to load Windows XP, my system halts at the Windows XP splash screen for about 25 seconds. Nothing happens, no disk activity or anything, the system just sits there.
I used Microsoft's Bootvis utility to see what was happening. It turns out that the nvatabus.sys driver consumes 100% CPU at boot for 25 seconds then the system continues to boot normally. Does anyone else see anything like this?
I am running the latest nForce drivers from MSI. The driver in question:
NVIDIA nForce3 Serial ATA Controller 2.6
Driver Date 6/3/2004
c:\WINDOWS\System32\DRIVERS\nvatabus.sys 5.10.2600.0446
Windows XP SP1
I have a RAID1 of two 160 GB SATA drives. The mirror is healthy and working fine.
After booting the system is rock-solid stable, no problems there. It's just this unexplained pause at boot. Does anyone have any ideas how to fix this?

Answer 1

ok check it out guy's this thing drove me insane all night last night and most of today. I was ready to return everything and give up. But alas all is not lost. Here is the rundown on what i just did.
My Equipment:
Athlon 64 3800+(w/ stock fan)
MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum Socket 939
2X512 Corsair TWINX1024-3200XLPRO ( with the cool led's )
2 SATA HD (1 Maxtor Diamond10 300 GB w/ 16mb cache, 1 Segate 160GB w/8mb cache)
PP&C 425 ATX Deluxe
Radeon 9700 Pro ( cat 4.8 )
Audigy2 ZS
Sony Floppy
Sony 8x52x52x32 DVD Rewrite
I have been reading and reading just like all you guy's. On a few websites i would pick up bits and pieces on what to try. Heres what i did. Upon Boot up i entered the bios. I then went to Cell Soft and adjusted my timings for my memory. I was at 2.5 not 2.75. I then set my speed down to 166. Exited and restarted. Big mistake everything ri=uns terrible slow and my expensive DDR 400 memory was showing up correctly at 333. Rebooted again entered the bios. reset my speed to 400. Then set the Overclock feature to manual. Set my timings at 2,2,5,2 200 and 2.75 volts. After saving settings and exiting I then turned off the computer. As per some other suggestions I moved my Audigy2 to the bottom most pci slot the one above the orange slot. I moved my memory to slots 2 and 4. I moved my SATA to slots 3 and 4. I rebooted went into the bios again and setup all my voltages. CPU was Auto, AGP was max yellow setting. Memory still at 2.75. I disabled the onboard serial and parrallel ports. Rebooted
Fearing the worst,
5 seconds, 10 seconds, windows screen loging prompt. There was nothing wrong at all. It rebooted effortlessly. It re found my Audigy card and wanted driver but that was it. I am going to reboot a few more times and then run sisandra to test. I hope some of this will help you. I post in a few after some of those reboots.