Hi~ I bought this refurbished IBM T41 Thinkpad laptop recently, and for a while it worked great, but now it freezes when it starts up. It will stay frozen for around 2-3 minutes, and when it is frozen I can't access my Start menu or anything on the taskbar, but I can refresh the desktop or mess with the desktop icons. I can't open any programs when it is frozen either. After the few minutes are up, it will finally finish starting everything and I'll get the little pop-up about auto updates being disabled, and I can then access my start menu. The first time I open my Start menu after the freeze is over, the "Network Connections" option isn't there, but if I reopen it comes back. I know that with a little patience, I can learn to live with this problem, but I feel like it kinda defeats the purpose of having a laptop. Thanks! IBM T41 Thinkpad, XP Pro Version 2002, SP2. 37.2 G hard drive, 512 RAM. Pentium M processor, 1600 MHz. avast! virus protection.

Try opening the Task Manager (ctrl-alt-del). Check the 'Processes' window to see if anything is using a lot of the CPU time (besides the System Idle Process). I hope you are running an anti-virus and firewall.

It sounds as though something that's set to start when Windows loads, is the cause of your problem. Go to Start > Run, type in "MSCONFIG" (without the quotes) and press Enter. Go to the Startup tab and uncheck everything, except your anti-virus, firewall, and anti-spyware apps. Please let us know if you found someone's advice to be helpful.