Slow XP boot BEFORE logon
OS: XP Pro SP2
CPU: Pent D 805
MB: Asus P5LD2 r2.0
I built this PC a little over a month ago and the boot time was blazing fast for a couple weeks. However, the last few weeks it has slowed down tremendously. This is not an issue where after I login it takes forever to get to the desktop, that actually happens quite quickly, but instead the problem seems to be with the PC hanging on the windows splash screen with the ticking marks right after the POST and before the login.
This person seems to have a similar problem to me, but no one offered any help that solved the problem it would seem.
http://ask.metafilter.com/mefi/31980
My startup programs pretty much only consist of Zone Alarm suite and my Catalyst driver center. I am fairly computer literate and have cleaned up my boot programs and even used Bootvis to try and solve the problem, but still nothing. Any suggestions? Thanks for your time.
p.s.> I suppose I should include that I have defragmented already, and no noticeable improvement in boot resulted.
Control panel>tools>disconnect network drive, returns the msg "You have no network drives to disconnect". I thought I might have had something still up since I transferred files from my old PC to this one and it might have been causing the PC to hang at start, but nothing was detected. However, I still have a hunch the problems might have started around the time I did set up that connection between PCs, but I cannot pinpoint that with precision, just a hunch.