XP- Excessive drive activity at startup

[Haasman]

I have a deskstop that when first coming up to the desktop has a lot of hard drive activity. It seems it takes almost a minute until the drive settles down.

Any suggestions as to what it is .... or how to sleuth out the cause? I know I can do a selective startup but any other suggestions that would quickly figure out what the cause is?

Thanks as always,

Haasman

[Statica]

The first question is what sort of programs are you running on start-up (msconfig is the quickest way to find out)? Is this hard drive activity is caused by programs loading up? Have you performed routine maintenance such as - defrag and disk check? Do you have a lot of files on your desktop (not shortcuts), but files?

[dubstr]

when did this start happening? the lst few times i actually heard the HD doing stuff.. it was on its last legs... etching sound...