Newbie running Suse 9.1 Pers., dual booting Win98....

Everything had seemed normal at boot-up:
splash screen (from motherboard, i suppose?) for a couple seconds...
then on to the grub OS selection screen moments later...
OS then loads at expected pace.

NOW, for some unseen reason:
splash screen for ~30 sec.
black for ~30 sec
one line of text, something about "grub phase 2" for ~15 sec.
then grub OS selection screen,
OS loads at usual pace.

Oddly, once in a while, everything will boot up normally, but most of the time i sit there waiting, cursing at my monitor.

The only hint I can provide is the quirk that made me hard-restart before the first time this happened: I was in Win98, and as my modem dialed-in, everything froze.... no mouse, no nothin'..... even the tone from the modem was frozen in whatever weird noise it was making at the time. I've never crashed while dialing up, but apparently it's not good....

I'm at a loss, so I would really appreciate any advice,

Thanks!