@Ronnie Guthrie: I’ve read that Microsoft article before and find it interesting. The article basically says that Bootvis was not designed to increase performance, as its “optimize” function is already done routinely by Windows XP.
There are plenty of people out there who will swear Bootvis did improve their boot times, and I personally can also attest to a performance increase.
Obviously, with any program/tool it is best to do your own research. From my experience, Bootvis has helped and there is little danger in trying it.

The bootvis tool was removed from the Microsoft servers for a reason…

“The boot optimization routines invoked by Bootvis.exe are built into Windows XP”