Whenever I turn on my pc it seems to pause for a very long time before actually loading windows. It loads several programs, which appear in the system tray, but the rest take a very long time to come up and do so all of a sudden. When it finally gets there it seems to scan the A drive and then load the rest as normal. I have checked that my hdd is defragmented and that there are no bad startup entries, as this can often cause problems of this sort. I have also checked in msconfig to make sure the comp is not cluttered with unnecessary programs.

Is your antivirus trying to scan the A drive? No time for love, Dr. Jones!

It sounds like one specific problem might be taking a long time. You could try disabling applications in msconfig to see which one(s) is the culprit. My guess is an overzealous anti-virus.

The only applications I have in my startup are peer guardian, a cookie monitoring program, which I only installed yesterday and 2 symantec/norton processes. I can confirm that it isn't the cookie program and that it isn't likely to be peer guardian. If it is the security then why is it doing this and how should I fix it? I can't remove norton from my startup unless I want my computer to be attacked.

The only applications I have in my startup are peer guardian, a cookie monitoring program, which I only installed yesterday and 2 symantec/norton processes. I can confirm that it isn't the cookie program and that it isn't likely to be peer guardian. If it is the security then why is it doing this and how should I fix it? I can't remove norton from my startup unless I want my computer to be attacked. (Posted Again as these forums don't seem to want to upload the posts you post.)