When I power on the phone, the first screen that appears is "Google" in white (no background/black) and 9 out of 10 times the phone freezes on that screen. The phone will stay on that screen indefinitely until I remove the battery- no buttons work, holding the power button doesn't shut it off, etc.

Typically I'll have to replace the battery and attempt to start up several times before the phone will go past the Google screen. Holding the power+volume up (from off) I can enter the Android boot menu with options to reboot and do recovery; these options don't have any impact- the phone still freezes on the Google screen.

The phone is unbranded so in a normal boot it flashes the Google screen and then goes into a colored Google/Android animation before finally going to the lock screen.

This has been a persistent problem for at least a couple months now. I know it started some time after updating to 4.0.4 but I don't think it was caused by the update (the problem didn't arise until a while after the update was installed).

Any tips on how to fix this? Any phone issues with my phone & OS version?

About phone:
Model number - Nexus S
Android version - 4.0.4
Baseband version - I9020XXKI1
Kernel version - 3.0.8
Build number - IMM76D