Unfortunately i'm worried about everything. Although this time i at least have a small reason, as its my media PC and will be used for watching TV i'd like it to turn on quickly, as my £20 freeview box is beating it for boot time at the moment... 

slow cpu/harddrive/ram cause this to show up
Maybe on an older system you've seen, for whatever reason, but not on all old machines. I've seen XP running on a host of old computers and it doesnt seem anything to do with the speed of the computer to me. My father, for example, uses an old P4 800mhz laptop with 256mb RAM (IIRC) and it doesn't show the bar on that.no links, if you use xp on an older system, you get these showing up
if performance is on par when in windows, don't worry about it