For some reason my minecraft has recently been acting up.

The symptoms:
After I press LOGIN i get a black screen for up to a minute before I can finally access the menu.
IT DOES NOT crash out during the black screen as it does in fact get me to the menu to play the game after about a minute or so.

I do want to point out I HAVE tried to play minecraft with a fresh jar file that contains NO MODS and I have also tried this with a jar file with mods on it and have still had the same results.
So we can rule out Mods being the cause. I also want to point out I have had this game for a long time now and know how to properly mod the jar file!!!

Another thing, my computer is really really good! there is no way this is lag.
My computer is less than 6 months old.
I have a 2nd Gen i7 2600k Quad Core @ 3.4 Ghz with 8 GB of ram and a 2 GB Geforce 550 ti superclocked graphics card. The superclocked part means it came preset to be overclocked to increase speed by 72 Mhz.
I only use a 32x texture pack and that has never before caused lag.
The only mods I use are optifine, and rei's minimap.