Takes forever to load taskbar and icons

[abacus]

Once I log in to my account, i have to wait about 7 minutes before the taskbar or desktop icons load up. I had logged on in the afternoon yesterday, everything was fine, but about an hour later, no-one had touched it, but it just started to take forever. At first we thought it would never load up, so we re-booted. Didn't work. Tried other accounts. Didn't work. but after a bit of patience, it loads up. but this lag is unacceptable. I'm just annoyed at the sudden lag. How could i speed it up?

[rjfvillarosa]

Can you tell us the full specifications of your machine? is it a store bought branded model or custom built? what operating system do you have?

[abacus]

I have a Windows XP home edition on a Dell 2003 or 2002 machine

[rjfvillarosa]

What antivirus and malware scanners do you use?
When was the last time you ran full scans on your system?
Do you install and uninstall a lot of programs?

[glc]

Have you checked your startups to see how much stuff is trying to load in the background?

More specs, please - how much ram, and hard drive size with how much free space. When was the last time you ran chkdsk /f and defragmented it?

[abacus]

eh, nevermind, it fixed itself...