Hi gwairways. Did you ever figure out a fix to your problem?
Because right now I feel your pain.
I'm running 10.6.8 on a 3,1 macbook with 2gb of ram (original factory ram, I might add) and I'm experiencing the exact same symptoms as you, all the way down to safe mode booting up at around 2-3 minutes and the blue screen lasting for about 10. Only difference is that my macbook originally shipped with 10.5 instead of 10.4 (the symptoms didn't begin until I upgraded to snow leopard though).
I will also add that sometimes, in addition to taking a long time to boot up, osx also takes awhile to fully shut down, with the fan and the indicator light often running upwards of a half a minute or so after the shut down signal and the blanking of the screen. The only way to turn the computer back on during these situations is to hold the power button down until the fan stops (something akin to a hard shut down, I believe), release, and hit the power button again. Other times, when I shut the lid of the macbook, it will be unable to recover from sleep mode and I'll have to do a hard reboot. Have you experienced either of these symptoms?
I have tried everything you have and more, including:
- putting in a brand new, factory sealed sata drive
- replacing the pram battery
- swapping different ram sticks in and out
- multiple clean installs of multiple versions of osx, multiple upgrades from one version to another, etc. Basically multiple combinations of everything imaginable. I've even tried repair disk with outdated versions of disk utility just for schlitz and giggles.
The blue screen still abounds.
Some people who are much wiser than me have indicated that my problem might be the logic board itself, something to do with an IOKit (I'm not sure what this is, nor is google particularly elucidating in this regard). I am inclined to disagree, though, as I've been able to boot various Windows and Linux distributions successfully, all at reasonable speeds. I figured that if my logic board was damaged, I would be having problems with these operating systems as well. Yet Ubuntu, Fedora, XP, and 7 all work fine for me. OS X is the only problem child so far. Have you tried booting a different OS on your computer?