Hi Everyone, Hope you can help me out with this, hopefully, simply problem. I have a Dell Inspiron 9300 and are running an up to date version of Windows XP Home Edition. Just recently My startup times and shutdown times seem to be taking a very long time for some reason. When Starting up, it reaches the point where you have to type in your password, and after typing it in and hitting enter its at this point it seems to take over a minute (while it says its load my personal settings) before it plays the usual Windows Startup little tune and the desktop appears. It never ever used to take this long before. I would say it would usually only take about 5 to 10 seconds before it played the tune and the desk top appeared. I've checked my machine over with Anti Virus and Spyware Products throughly as well as running Kaspersky's online scanner and nothing was found. I've deleted a lot of stuff off my hard drive and de-fragged it, my hardrives total size is 71.4gb and it has 32gb free. I've also started up in a safe mode turning everything off except Windows Services and xp system related software. I thought it might be a virus or spyware program doing something at startup that was slowing it down. But, after typing my password in, it still takes over a minute for the desktop to appear. My anti-virus software is Norton Internet Security and my Anti virus software is SUPERAntiSpyware that I have running all the time (although I have ran other Spyware scanners too) I've also created a fresh system restore point, but that doesn't do anything. Does anyone have any idea how I can fix this problem please? I'm thinking of running a Registry Cleaning program I have, but I thought I'd check here first before doing that. The only other thing I can do is re-install my whole machine. Thank you for your time and look forward to any helpful advice, Ken