I'm looking for the fastest (boot-up and usage) no-hassle linux distribution with the following features:

Wireless networking
Firefox
Openoffice
DVD and mp3 playback.

I'm prepared to spend some time picking packages but NOT hours sorting through scripts etc.

Any help would be much appreciated! I have used Ubuntu for a long time but it's simply too bloated, and I have tried searching for a distro offering the above but it's quite a jungle when it comes to distros so if someone could help me that would be great!

Debian is lighter than Ubuntu. You haven't given us your PC specs, so it's all a bit finger in the air. Did you disable unneeded services and remove unneeded packages?

Basically any distribution can become equally fast. Just a matter of configuring for what you need.

Of course the default configuration varies. I am using Gentoo. This one is very fast, but can be tricky to install and not recommended for beginners. Although I don't have to mess with scripts as such there are plenty of other configurations to sort out to speed things up.

As Xavier says, what hardware do you have? E.g. if you have a brand new AMD Phenom with 4 Gb of memory, I would say forget it, no extra speed needed Might be slightly different if you have, say an old Intel 80486 machine with 64 Mb memory...

Mons
Edit: Also use Firefox 3 and latest openoffice (2.4.1?) they are both faster than their predecessors.