Slow logon when not on domain

Hi all.
i'm kinda new here, so bear with me

I have a problem, that i'm hoping someone can help me with.
i have a windows Vista x64 SP2 machine, which I use both at work and at home.
At work there is no problem, the laptop boots, logs in, and is active very fast (or at least fast enough ), but wwhen I get home, the logon process takes approx 2 mins.

My logic tells me, that since it more or less freezes at the "welcome" screen, the 2 mins is some sort of timeout, before it finds out that the DC cannot be found.
or maybe it is the time it takes to find out that the network drives I have mapped cannot be located. (I have tried turning of the Wifi before booting, but it didn't help)

I'm very use to only setting the machine to hibernate, which works fine, but once in a while I like to turn it off completely.

my question is simply put, this:

1) Is there some way I can set the timeout to a lower value so that It doesn't look for 2 full minutes?
2) can I tamper with the cached logins, and will this help?
3) can I create a logon script that simply checks if the DC can be contacted, and if not, then simply remove the mapped drives, so it doesn't try to remap them at logon?

I know the last question is not really placed in the right forum, but any help would be very appreciated.

Does it still take longer to start at home if you are booting up, instead of coming out of hibernation? When you put your computer in hibernation, it saves all active states to a temporary file, then powers down without "shutting down". Part of the active state that it automatically resumes when coming out of hibernation, is the network connections as they were at the other location. Computers can sometimes be easily confused, and this may be the case for your laptop.

Two things about this situation that I generally recommend to people:

1) Shut down the computer instead of hibernate. Most people don't shutdown or reboot enough, especially with laptops. Reboots often fix many problems or temporary foibles that come up in Windows.

2) If you don't have a Windows password, create one. Then when you boot your computer, let the computer have a minute or so on the password screen while it loads stuff in the background and makes network connections, before you type in the password.

Every version of Windows I've worked on has benefited from their owners following these two guidelines. I can't speak to their necessity for Windows 7 yet, since I've only worked on one Windows 7 computer so far.

It seems to be slow regardless of me shutting down or putting the machine in hibernation?

I'm off to work monday, and then next week I will try to note the time it takes for the machine to boot at work and at home.