Thanks, It doesn't bother me, I just thought that in some cases one may wish to increase the delay, or possible decrease it to 'improve' boot-up speed. I would assume that it's a delay, since it appears to be similar on both a P1 233 and a Athlon 2.4G - not that I've paid too much notice.
By the way, I've noticed that if you press F2 while the machine is booting (V9.0) it will offer the opportunity to log in at the prompt. This waits for several seconds before continuing to the graphical login screen. I would assume that this delay can be changed somewhere.
This "delay" is either the result of the slowness for the {x,g,w,k}dm init script to load, or as you say there is a delay. This delay will be defined in one of the top-level init scripts, most likely: /etc/rc.d/boot