Ahhh I take it you have noguiboot enabled, if I understand correctly after the bios splash screen you have a blank screen for about 10 seconds then another one after the Xp splash screen.
If thats the case, seem to me that your hard drive is the bottle-neck going to a SSD drives should eliminate that. Just make sure to get one with really fast reads/write speeds I use an MTron.
What kills my boot time is my MB post really slow about 19seconds
once I'm past post screen takes about 4 seconds for windows and RR to load.
P.S
Have you run bootvis I find it really help.