Maybe the boot is faster now because I'm on a hard drive that has more space. At any rate, I used speakupconfig to speed up the rate of the speech, but that doesn't kick in until after I would lose speech if I didn't hit the alt key. Is there a way to get the speech to go faster from the very beginning. This is just a shot in the dark, but I'm thinking the speech might not shut down if it didn't get so ridiculously far behind the boot process. Maybe that's farfetched, but nobody else has come up with anything so I guess my guess as as good as any. I'm also still concerned about the init module not loading and random seed loading instead.--Cheryl