What can slow down/How can I speed up the pre-kernel boot steps? I've got a late 2007 Macbook Pro with 4 GB of RAM and an SSD.  I am running Boot Camp and have an OptiBay.  I have partitioned the SSD and secondary drive to devote half of each to Lion and half to Windows 7.  There is an additional Lion 'Recovery' partition - I've considered re-partitioning with gparted to remove this as I don't need it, but have left it alone for now.

The SSD especially makes things very fast; I can boot from the boot selector (this thing) to my Lion desktop (ignoring password entry times) in 23 seconds and to my Windows 7 desktop in 26 seconds. Both are a marked improvement over booting to just Lion with my 500 GB, 5400 RPM Scorpio Blue hard drive, which took some 45 seconds. 

However, the time to reach the boot selector has increased greatly: It now takes 25 seconds to reach the boot selector, where previously the computer would spin up the drive, chime, and reach the Apple logo in just two or three seconds.  The increased time to this screen negates the improved boot times in the actual OS.

Is there something I'm doing wrong in my partition scheme to cause this slow boot up?

The boot sequence doesn't seem to have this much work to do in these steps.  The documentation says that the operations performed which are taking 25 seconds are: 


Power On: Boot-ROM/RAM check is initialized
BootROM-POST: Power-on self test of Boot ROM
BootROM-EFI: Boot chime
Boot EFI: Mounts drives and loads drivers and other files needed to start the OS


After that, I select a disk (or let the default disk load) and the following steps occur:


Kernel: Grey screen with Apple logo and spinning gear
launchd: Brushed metal screen
loginwindow: Login window appears
User Environment Setup: Desktop and dock appear


It does boot, so I can only assume that the BootROM-POST passed.  Is it possible it's 'barely passing' and testing multiple times or moving slowly?  I don't see how the first three steps could take much time at all, so I assume that it's the Boot EFI step that's taking forever.  I've also read the refit documentation on the boot process, which goes into a bit more detail about hardware discovery and driver loading.  Is it possible that the new drives are re-installing their drivers each time I boot? 

Any assistance towards removing or even simply better understanding this delay would be much appreciated!
The boot selector scans all possible boot devices, including network, firewire, and USB devices.  Try disabling WiFi, unplugging everything, resetting PRAM (like cksum said) and then rebooting again.  The fewer choices the boot-loader has, the faster it will load.  The ultimate speed up, is to go into System Preferences -> Startup Disk to select the desired partition.  It sounds like that is not what you want, but it illustrates the process.