Windows XP SP3 delayed wireless/internet connection

This has been going on since I got a bug of some sort back in late March/early April.  My problem is that when I last refreshed (formatted and reinstalled everything) on my laptop (Inspiron 1501), my wireless would connect almost immediately upon boot, and always has.  After I got the bug, and installed Avast! antivirus (and found nothing serious, go figure), now my laptop waits a full 2 minutes before connecting to my wireless network.  And also to run Yahoo Messenger (but not AOL, which I don't have running on startup).  However, when I enter the Task Manager via ALT-CTL-DEL, within the 2-minute window, the Manager says that Yahoo is running (which it isn't), but I don't have any internet connection startup items (wmiprvsvc, or however you spell it, for one) loading until the 2 minutes has passed.  There are times where I need an immediate connection as I don't have time to wait forever for it to connect.  The fact that my wireless card is going out has nothing to do with the software not being loaded (sometimes won't connect...  I think it's time for a new one as it's at least 4 years old).

Now, Avast has been completely and utterly obliterated from my hard drive, including all leftover files, folders, and registry entries, since the end of April, as I was hoping removing it would get rid of this problem.  It hasn't.  I've modified some startup group items in the MSConfig applet, to no avail.  I'm at wits end, and I'm not looking forward to reinstalling everything again just to get the internet connection working like it's supposed to.  I don't use the wired networking chip (disabled in BIOS), so that wouldn't help, either.  I've run my spyware detector (SpyBot Search and Destroy) many times since the bug appeared, and it keeps finding a few things here and there and removing them, but still the delayed connection remains.  If anyone has any suggestions other than repairing/reinstalling Windows via the install/restore DVD, I'm all ears (or eyes, as the case may be).

Oh, and no, I don't remember what the original bug was, but it was serious enough to warrant reinstalling Avast.