My system boots normally only half the time

Hello,
I've been trying to properly boot all day and nothing has worked.
Symptom:
Boots to a blue screen no pinwheel or anything.
It froze while working, the pinwheel and everything froze. So I turned it of and on. Now it won't boot normally. The only thing that was open at the time was Firefox and Entourage.
It was actually booting normal randomly. For example out of 6 different start ups only the 1st and 3rd startup actually arrived at the login
What I have tried:
1 Repairing permissions (using Tiger install disc)
2 Repairing disk (it had a minor error)
3 Trashing the following files in single user mode as described in http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1411?viewlocale=en_US
/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/preferences.plist
/Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow.plist
/Library/Preferences/com.apple.windowserver.plist
The result was that everytime I booted I arrived at the blue screen. So, I no longer had a random successful boot. I replaced the files and the random success returned.
4 Basically I tried every step in the above knowledge base, except the OS 9 options (I don't ahve OS9), updating the firmware (I believe it is up to date), with no success.
5 I restarted without the network cable connected. I thought this helped at first because it did start up but it continued to have random success while the cable wasn still not connected.
6 I even renamed the entire preferences folder as described in the above link without success.
It appears I'm running out of things to try but I haven't yet reinstalled the system, but I'm trying to avoid it.
Any suggestions?
Message was edited by: reydnad

Is it possible that it could be taking an extremely long time to boot?
This is where I'm at.
I did ANOTHER archive and install. Boot to blue screen, but I just let it sit in the blue screen while I did other stuff for about 15-20 minutes.
I shut it down and it booted properly! But gave me an error saying OSX unexpectedly quit upon login.
I shutdown properly and it boots to blue again.
An interesting note is that if I leave it a while in the blue the funs really start going. This didn't happen the time before it booted correctly...
I'm not sure what to make of all this. Any suggestions?
Thanks for all your help so far.

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