Hello,

I have a slow boot problem (1.5-2 min.) on XP pro.

xp pro sp2
PIII 933 Mhz
384 mb sdram
nvidia riva tnt 2 mod 64 AGP
maintained daily w/
AVG AV
spybot S&D

On booting I get Dell splash screen, normal display brightness (20 sec.),
then black screen with white progress bar across bottom of screen (about 2
sec.) then the xp splash screen appears very dim for about 1 minute. During
the dim screen the xp progress bar is empty and the HD is not spinning.
Then bam, the screen brightens up and it appears as though its a normal
boot, progress bar is working etc. At this point it takes about 30 seconds
to get to logon screen and performance seems to be normal. MS bootvis
indicates the cpu is running 100% during the time of the dim screen.

Windows event viewer indicates event 1517, source Userenv, symbolic name
EVENT_HIVE_SAVED, seemingly a problem with having to save the user registry
while a service was still using it. The event viewer indicates that this is
happening frequently, but indicates that no user action is required.

I did get an error caused by nvidia graphics driver but have since installed
different drivers and still get slow boot.

Did a clean boot according to MS article 310353 still slow/same.

Chkdsk ran, no problems. 40 MB HDD 60% free. Defragged. Still slow boot.

Reseated vid card, ide cables etc. Once booted the system performs well but
for the life of me this is eating me up because I know its not right.

Anyone have any ideas?

Thanks in advance,

Jeff