Microsoft System Management Bios Driver error - SP2 Boots Slowly

Service Pack 2, for the most part, is great. The pop-up blocker, security features, and other little tidbits are very nice. However, occasionally things do go wrong. If your system boots incredibly slow after the SP2 install, then check your device manager for "Microsoft System Management Bios Driver" with a little yellow exclamation next to it.

I've only had this happen once, on a machine where the SP2 install evidently crashed, but even after the clean install of SP2 it still had the error. As far as I can tell, Microsoft System Management Bios Driver is an addition that allows Windows to communicate with the BIOS for power management.

The solution? Well, since I was completely unable to find anything out there to fix the driver, I simply removed it from System Devices. Voila! The machine instantly boots fine and there are no (as far as I can tall) negative implications.

So, if SP2 makes your boot time horrendous then I'd definitely check for this little quirk.