Okay. When I first installed XP, everything was cool. Startup and shutdown were pretty quick -- a few seconds for each. Then I had that Easy CD problem and had to reformat and reinstall. Now for some reason, my startup and shutdown are horribly slow. On bootup, XP will sit twiddling its thumbs at the "Welcome" screen for a good 15 seconds or more before getting to the desktop, and on shutdown it'll sit there running shutdown scripts for about the same length of time. Any ideas? I *know* it's not supposed to be this slow, and I can't see anything I've installed lately being the culprit.

I have the same problem. The only thing I have been able to do to help is assigning myself a static IP for my TCPIP for my network card. XP boasts to start faster than the older OS's (it doesn't). It gets to the LOGIN screen but then it seems to do all the things that used to go on during the days of DOS bootups at that particular moment, including looking for a DHCP server. Changing to static makes a great difference. Hope this helps a little.

Unfortunately @ home has changed the way it works. One of their biggest problems over the past few years has been IP conflicts caused by a combination of people who've hard-coded their IPs in their network configuration, and those who leave their network configuration alone and let @ home assign them an IP (which, until recently, has pretty well amounted to the same thing anyway.) Recently though they came up with the "@ Home Toolbox" which purports to be a kind of self-contained first stage tech support kit to help people diagnose their own problems. (The @ Home equivalent of Microsoft Windows' Help and Support Center, and just about as useless) Behind the scenes though it is designed to monitor the network, which itself has been reconfigured to make people's IP addresses more dynamic, the theory being that if everyone installs this toolbox and lets the OS handle everything, IP conflicts (and presumably any other problems) would soon disappear. What it amounts to is all the network settings are set to obtain their information from @ home, and the little system service that gets installed takes care of the rest. Anyway, the thing is that I don't think this is the problem. I know that if there was a problem with the network under 98 or Me, it would take longer to boot because it would sit there querying the DHCP server for an IP address and waiting for a response until it either gave one or timed out. If the network was running fine however, bootup went about as normal. When I first installed XP, my network settings were left alone and bootup was quick -- the "welcome" screen barely lasted more than a couple of seconds before the desktop appeared and all the system services/systray items started loading. Ditto for shutdown; running shutdown scripts was almost instantaneous. Now, both ends are slow as molasses, yet nothing about my network settings has changed, so why all of a sudden the slowdown? Well, I *have* modified my network settings, but only a few days ago due to an IP conflict (which turned out to be ZoneAlarm's fault and not an IP conflict at all) and regardless, the problem existed before that. So that's why I still don't think it's my network settings. Is there a way to examine what's going on during boot? OR a way to look at the shutdown scripts its running to see exactly what it is that it's doing? Perhaps there's a problem service or something that's just kinda hanging at bootup, which would cause the system to have trouble closing it at shutdown... that's about the only thing that makes sense to me.

Another idea, when you formated did you do a mbr and used fdisk, if you didn't your problem could be a conflick in the master boot record,eg. when you boot xp might be having trouble in which boot record to use the old or the new (reinstalled) one. When shutting down it would have the same problems not knowing which record to write to.

I didn't use fdisk at all. I simply reformatted my C partition using NTFS straight from the WinXP install CD.

When you format you format the readable area not master boot record. Ex.take a unformated 1.44 floppy format it free disk space reads 1.38 but do a chkdsk it reads 144, same princple works on hard drives. To do a clean install you should use fdisk /mbr than creat new partion. When you install a new o/s you write over the old but not totaly. That is why people install the latest o/s dont like it format install old system and after a time the machine screws up and blame the new o/s for screwing up their machine not knowing they themselves caused the problems. That what keeps techies in business.

I had the same problem and fixed it by disabling the remote desktop option in my netmeeting.