My W2K Pro system one day decided that it just wanted to take forever to boot. The status bar on the bottom of the W2K screen would just stop in the middle and sit. Eventually it would boot but I don't know how long it took because I just left it alone while I went and did other things. I tried it in safe mode and found it was getting stuck when loading MUP.SYS. I found out what MUP.SYS was all about and I checked the forums here and got some ideas on what to do. On my system I also noticed that one of my CD ROM drive lights was blinking all the time and I could not get the drive to open. It did not show up in My Computer. I unplugged this suspicious CD ROM drive and then my system got past MUP.SYS just fine. I did not have to replace the MUP.SYS file - just get rid of this defective CD ROM drive. I will replace this CD ROM drive some day! Hopefully, this will help someone else that is experiencing a problem with slow W2K booting.

hey thnx for the info...I just noticed I have the exact same problem... CD not opening for a few secs and when I do open it, only then does windows continue loading up :) I also checked the logs and it says CD rom block 1 bad sector? anyone got more info on that? thanks