I still think it has something to do with this motherboard
I had this barebone system in the basement that I haven't used untill now and I decided to give it a try
It's an amd based cpu running at 2.08ghz so it's faster than the one I have xp installed on now but not as fast as the one I installed it on earlier just to try it out and see if the boot speed improves
The end result is that it's just as fast (20 seconds) on a 2.08ghz as it is on a 3.46ghz but for some reason on the 1ghz motherboard it's actually slower(about 1 minute) than on a laptop running at 500mhz (30-40 seconds)

I swapped the power supply first but it did not make any difference
Only when I changed the motherboard there was a huge improovement

So if anyone has a pc266 with an amd cpu and tries to run xp I would advise
to switch to a faster motherboard althogh probably most people are using much faster motherboards these days