So I've got a A64 3200+ machine, 1Gb of memory. It runs Win2000 SP4.

My friend has an AXP 2000+, 512M of memory. He runs WinXP gold-master edition.

His boot is probably twice the speed of mine, despite a 333MHz raw clock difference, less memory, and a inferior processor design.

What's especially weird is that it seems like every Win2000 box I've tried takes about the same length of time to boot, ranging from a Celeron 533 with 400Mb of SDRAM, to a Duron 1.6 with 256Mb of DDR, to the abovementioned A64.

The only thing which ever seemed to make Win2000 moderately perky was to clock my A64 up to 2500/250, but it wasn't stable, ran too hot, and still didn't make it feel that perky compared to the XP box.

Is there something like bootvis for 2000 which can tell me where the time goes?

Hmmm not sure about the bootvis program (that or atleast anything like it - it having sparked the destruction of a perfectly good XP installation for me about a year ago).
I do however know what was causing my extremely slow boots up until the day before yesterday.
It appears my aging hard drive had gotten 6 consecutive bad reads (numerous/ frequent ATAPI errors in event viewer are a red flag) and thus Windows reverted it to PIO only mode and the place to normally edit this was greyed-out . The only way I found to fix it was uninstalling the IDE controller containing the defected drive from the device manager which caused windows to reinstall it and the drive automatically on reboot -then allowing me to select the drive to use DMA transfers which immediately shortened it (boot time) from about a minute and a half to 10 seconds (50MB/s+ vs the horror 2.5MB/s of PIO)..
Hope this helps some!