Long pause during XP boot and login

[sbrown02]

I have Windows XP professional running on a P4-2.4ghz with 1gig of RAM. A few months ago I started to notice something that's been driving me crazy. The PC is setup for user logon. So it boots to a screen where users can select which username they want to logon. The machine boots fast to the logon screen. But when I select my username and press enter, as it starts to load all the apps (the ones that appear in the bottom right hand corner of the display) it hits a point in the process where it pauses for a long time (about 60 seconds or more). After waiting for what seems like forever, it then finishes loading the last few apps which are (Belkin Bulldog Service Battery backup, Roxio GoBack, my LAN/DSL connection, and Norton Antivirus).

Now here's the wierd part. I assumed one of these apps was causing the long pause so I thought I'd just disable them all within MSCONFIG and reboot and the problem would go away. So I went into MSCONFIG, disabled all the services items and rebooted. It still did the same thing, i.e., it paused a long time before loading my LAN/DSL connection.

The long pause is a pain because the computer won't let you do anything while its waiting to load other apps. So for example, if I try to open MSWORD it waits for all the apps to load before it will load MSWORD. And on occasion if you try to open something before it finishes it will lock up.

Any thoughts on what's going on with my machine?

Thanks

[bailey]

have you run a good virous program and adaware. you may have some spyware running in the background causeing this problem

[sbrown02]

I do run Ad-aware 6 every month or two and remove items that are questionable.

[noby]

and did you update it?

I suggest yoy run Spybot as well

noby

[sbrown02]

An update to my Ad-aware did the trick. Problem fixed. Thanks. Looks like I need to run this more frequently than every month or two.

[Miz]

As noby suggested, adding Spybot to your arsenal along with Ad-Aware is a good idea. Each finds things the other doesn't.