You might want to check your eDir design, placement of replica's, treewalking across slow WAN-connections, policy file locations, number of workstation assigned apps, etc. There's no reason why it should take an extra minute for the login to come up in a Novell environment. Have you ever used Wireshark to see what happens when the ZEN-agent starts up?

They've added IPv4 to the new firewire stack. You know, the one they put in the kernel some time ago in favor of the old one and caused some headaches to firewire users.