Hi everybody! (Dr. Nick) Whenever I boot my computer it loads normally until the XP welcome screen where it takes twice as long to load as normal, then when it gets loaded the only thing that shows up is the background picture. I read some other posts on this subject but when I Ctrl+Alt+Del I had no process called SYSU.exe running. But there was two svchost.exe SYSTEM processes running and one of them was using up 95% - 99% of the CPU so I ended it. As soon as I did it finished loading windows correctly and everything seemed to work ok. While all the applications do work ok, I have no sound, when I went to Control Panel/Sounds & Audio all the drop down boxes to select which audio device to use are grayed out and say "no device available". My device manager on the other hand says my onboard audio is installed and running properly. I have run Norton, Symantec, Housecalls, Ad-aware, and SPYBOT, and none of them report anything about a virus. Please help me, I've exhausted all other resources. Thanks. Daniel J Bryant

Sounds like perhaps your sound drivers are causing a conflict when windows tries to load them. Look for the latest drivers for your sound card and try reinstalling the hardware.

Thanks but the part that I'm most worried about is the not loading without ending that process.