Question : Problem: PC takes up to 1 hour to boot

system takes approx 1 hr to boot. On power up goes ok untill checking disks then seems to hang for an indeterminate time of between 5 and 60 minutes when I finally get into the system it works good as gold.
I have changed power supply and mobo battery left the system without battery for 2 days after clearing the CMOS to no avail, if I "go back" it seems to be fine for a couple of weeks and starts hanging again. system consists of DFI Lan Party mobo. AMD Athlon XP 3000+ processor. 512 mb Geil memory. ATI Radeon 7200 VIVO vid card. ac97 onboard audio. 2x Maxtor 40Gb Hdd. 1 partitioned 4x 10Gb. 1x 40Gb. 1x samsung 160Gb Hdd. partitioned 60Gb "C". 100Gb "D". 1x LG DVD Ram RW.  1x Pioneer DVD reader that does not of late seem to be recognised by the system. I am running Windows XP sp2 I don't no if it's a hardware or software problem as I have not heard of this problem before also the system will not even start in safe mode or into BIOS.

Answer : Problem: PC takes up to 1 hour to boot

Sounds like the Hard drive is bad.  Run a hard drive checker.  If you don't have any, you can always create a dos boot disk and you chkdsk.