You are right about boot times – Jaunty was way faster than Intrepid, but Karmic is now about as fast or may be a little faster than Intrepid.
My biggest gripe about the boot screens is that they took away the progress bar. I’ve grown used to seeing how far my system is from being ready for use, even if it was subjective.
B/W logo is not my thing either.

I don’t think the boot time increased, but I used to have Intrepid on that machine, so I cannot compare to Jaunty’s boot time on it. This is a media center pc, so I hope I can disable some services and improve the boot time even more.

Your comment about the boot screens is highly subjective. I actually like the boot screens – they are ascetic and elegant. I like the new login theme too.

I’ve got the red exclamation mark after a suspend/resume failure, but I don’t worry about that – I know that suspend never worked on this particular machine, probably due to a pretty old nvidia card.

But again, I’m talking about a media pc, so I don’t have high expectations for it. I only put a newer system on it hoping that resume would work. It didn’t. Oh well, not a big deal.

Thank you for the information though… I’ll stick with Jaunty on both my desktop and laptop for now.