Insanely long boot-up times

This started last night, and I'm not sure why. My computer has always been a bit slow when it came to booting up and shutting down, but now, it takes over 10 minutes for the XP welcome screen and my desktop to show up when I start my system.

After the Windows logo and boot bar finishes loading, which only takes 10 seconds or so, the computer just sits there at a blank screen without showing anything. I hear hard drive activity, so I'm not sure exactly what is stalling the process.

I have tried running a registry cleaner (RegSeeker), and although it found over 2,000 invalid entries, it didn't seem to do much. I am assuming that there is some kind of stubborn driver that is affecting everything, but I am not sure how to go about finding it.

Alright, I'm no master but this may help.

Try a program called ace utilities, pay close attention to the startup section. maybe something there is messing you up. I love ace utilities, you should too =)

Try defragging, that always helps

Try Tunexp, it's a really nifty tool for that kind of stuff

System restore will work wonders if it's enabled.

If you think it might be a driver, maybe dxdiag could help you.

Lastly, check S.M.A.R.T (active smart of speedfan) to see if it is a hard drive, regardless of it's activity.

I hope this helps, good luck.

I also hope you aren't actually banned and I just wasted 5 minutes

Start > Run > type "msconfig"

Although I don't know how much bearing this has on loading before you actually begin logging in, maybe there's something in there that'll jump out?

Try this: Device manager > IDE controllers > Properties of the Primary controller and check the advanced tab. If the current transfer mode is anything but Ultra DMA Mode 5, uninstall the Primary controller and restart when prompted. You may also have to restart again when it detects and reinstalls the driver.

I see Ultra DMA Mode 5, so that seems to be fine.

I heard that Microsoft has a utility called bootvis.exe specifically designed to deal with boot-up issues...but many users haven't been able to boot up at all after using it.

TweakHound - Bootvis Tool

If anybody has experience with it, please share. It's able to show you a graph of processing times between different initializations, but I don't want to mess anything up by hitting the wrong button.

Apparently it is built into XP and optimizes your system automatically, which would explain why my system speed is so random.

I haven't used bootvis in some time, but I don't recall any problems with it.

How's your network configuration? Do you have windows automatically get its IP address from a router? If so, try setting the adress manually. XP can be really slow to start when it can't get its address for whatever reason.