I have quite a fast PC, 3.4ghz quad core, 4 gig ram and windows 7, just timed my Hal, it took 20 seconds to load, now we know that netbooks are actually quite a lot slower than a fast PC, so to me 40 seconds actually doesn’t sound that slow.
Here is my win 7 WEI score, when I start up Hal it uses 100% of one cpu core, so if your processor score is lower than mine Hal will take longer than 20 seconds to load.
Bill makes a good point, more programs running in the background will slow Hal’s boot time down.