grub-0.97-r3 loads itself, stage 1.5 and splash screen very slowly upon booting. Previous revision (r2) is faster. I suspect the new geometry reading functions to be responsible for that. As emerge --info is not relevant to this bug, what other info is needed?
-r2 has the same slowdown, looks like it's related to something else. Interesting part is that it happens when machine was suspended using software suspend 2, and doesn't happened when it was just halted. Anyway: not a grub fault, so I'm closing it as invalid, sorry for bug-spam.