Didn't produce any results with the pin-shortening, however as I can (did it today) connect to the D-link gateway via console with no problems, the cable and serial port is fine on the receiving computer.
I'm starting to get very amazed over how difficult this is, I have tried surely 20 different ways to solve this without any luck.
Perhaps your harddisk is in poor condition, lots of soft read errors and the retries are taking a long time.
Do you have a fairly new motherboard? If so, I suggest you try a recent snapshot build of pfSense 1.2.3. A number of people have found the hardware support in 1.2.3 is better. I have seen 1.2.3 boot promptly on a system on which 1.2.2 hung.
The embedded version is split into two paritions, one called pfSenseCfg, and in the folder "conf" there is a file called "trigger_initial_wizard" - deleting this file should make the wizard go away, as far as I know.
I would definitely suspect the media at this point. I suppose it could be the controller, but that is much less likely than the CF dying.
The real way to know would be to pull the card out and mount it in another system and see if the file is still corrupted there, but it may be safe to assume the card is about to die.