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Darwin:
Hi Tom,

Thanks for noting that - I did follow Carol's advice sometime back and it worked to a degree. However, three things solved the problem (enough that I'm satisfied, anyway):

1. I disabled ZoneAlarm Pro and Winpatrol 2007 Plus from starting with windows - I am on a home network behind a hardware firewall so at home just have the XP firewall enabled when I'm here. I'll disable it and turn on ZA whenever I am offsite (it's a notebook).
2. I replaced my 80 GB 5400 rpm drive with a 120 GB 5400 rpm drive. I *think* this sped things up because the 80 GB drive was down to 3 GB free on the Windows (C:\) partition and about 5 GB on the My Documents (E:\) partition. I could have deleted a lot of stuff (and in fact had done so quite recently), but with storage being so cheap these days - I only paid $87 CDN. for the new drive - why bother?
3. I uninstalled a lot of junk that I don't use much OR, if I didn't want to uninstall an app, I simply created a DirectAccess abbreviation for it and disabled it from starting with windows. I've gone from having over 70 processes running after a boot to 48 and things are much brisker now.

The real difference came with disabling ZA and WP though... I don't need WP monitoring my startup folder all the time (it scanned my startup folder and the registry on each startup and would peg my processor at over 70% while it did so - it didn't USED to do this, so I'm hoping a later build will fix it. However, I don't miss having it run in the background and am happy to open it every so often to check things out).

Anyway, thanks again.

Best,

Mike

Tekzel:
For startup issues you can find out where the problem lies often by using MSConfig and disabling all regular startup apps and see if the problem is gone, if not go in and disable all 3rd party (non MS) start up services, etc.  I have got to mention a program I found a little while ago and am in love with:

http://www.r2.com.au/software.php?page=2&show=startdelay

This takes over the launching of startup apps and you can define the order in which they load and the delay between them.  It brings my system to a usable state as SOON as I log in and continues starting up stuff over the course of the next two minutes.  I have all the junk that needs starting but I don't care about when it starts at the end, and all the stuff I just gotta have at the beginning.  I LOVE this program.  Also, if you choose GUI mode startup it gives you this cool bar across the top letting you know what its doing, when startup is complete the bar goes away and you know its over. 

And my opinion on ZoneAlarm is no one should ever use the free version for anything, ever.  It sucks on every possible level you can imagine. 

Darwin:
Thanks for the comments, Tekszel. I've tried out Startdelay in the past (discovered it right here at donationcoder courtesy of a post by Carol) and probably wasn't patient enough to figure out how to organise things. WinPatrol 2007 actually features similar funcitonality now, though it's just been implemented and has a way to go before being as powerful as Startdelay. It didn't really help because Windows itself was taking so long to load. That trouble seems gone now and as I only boot my computer once in a blue moon I'm not that concerned about tweaking things further (but if I see 12 minute boot times again I'll be concerned!).

As noted above, I'm using ZoneAlarm Pro (current version) - or rather I have it installed but no longer run it - and don't intend to renew my subscription at this stage. It's a resource HOG and in future when I want to be away from the security of my home network (which doesn't actually happen that often) I think I'll either continue to use whatever version of ZoneAlarm Pro I wind up with at the end of my current subscription or a freebie like GhostWall or Comodo.

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