Did you try updating the hacks.ini manually yourself, add the codes from the wiki for 4.1U then you can block those updates:

http://wiibrew.org/wiki/Preloader/hacks#USA_4.1

I'll take a look and see if i can make a quick hex edit of preloader 0.29 that loads the new HBC soon, don't even know the id it uses yet so i'll have to check it out.

The reason it takes longer to boot with the sd card in is probably because you have bootmii installed as boot2, you can just rename the bootmii folder on your sd card to something else to get the same performance (i think, otherwise its just slow mounting your sd card).

Edit:
I just switched my Wii on after recently updating the HBC myself and I got about 4 black screens in a row. I then set the autoboot delay to 1 sec and also tested bootmii off (no bootmii folder) which works flawlessly. I'm also getting problems getting to the system menu from the new HBC 1.0.7. I've got a feeling there are some bugs in these new releases, I hadn't played about the new releases much since they came out. Did you install the latest bootmii at the same time as the HBC out of interest?

This post has been edited by retrohead, Fri, August 6th, 2010 at 00:41

Reason: bug?