yes i was needing help and seem to be running out of options.i had norton 2001 with windows me subscription ran out for 2 years did not have protection,checked system 2 backdoors,1 trojan,1 virus,reinstalled os and formatted and wrote 0's to drive,now have norton system security 2004,system awesome no viruses runs great never hangs,no spyware,resources at 71 to 80 percent all of the time and no error messages,just blew out the dust with an computer air gun on the case a month ago,have done selective startup with msconfig,only have systray,explorer,ccapp(norton) running,when i got the computer about 5 years ago gateway had all of this crap installed on thier that i didn't want,anyway the problem is this when i start the computer up it will show the windows splash screen,the a noise will come out of my tower like a shhhhhhh! noise and it will stop responding,then i manually turn the tower off wait ten seconds and it loads fine with no problems and goes to the desktop,it works the second time every single time with no problem,my computer has always seemed to me to take forever to get to the desktop anywhere from 45 seconds to 2 minutes to load and only takes 10 seconds to shut down which doesn't make sense to me,my computer it seems has always had trouble at startup since i got it new 5 years ago,it will load fine then every once in a while hang on loading the desktop,someone told me on the windows splash screen to press esc to see what's loading at startup i did that and it just goes to a blank black screen and then keeps loading,i looked at my bootlog and no failures in there,i know this is probably some little thing or setting but it is driving me nuts!all i ever wanted was desktop to load in 30 seconds or under and not have these startup problems.thanks for the help:)

joe, SWAG, "gateway had all of this crap installed". My guess has to be that they had something machine specific in there (likely patting their back) and when you threw out the bathwater, the baby was in it. Ask them for the answer or perhaps another user knows. HTH. Ed in Texas.

If you have less than 128MB of RAM, that could be the reason it takes so long to boot up. Windows ME can use over 120 MB just to boot up, and not having that much can cause excessive swapfile usage just booting up. Not haveing current versions of device drivers like any network adapter or video drivers, can cause delays in booting.