when I start windows xp, the desktop is blank and no icons show on desktop nor the task bar, after 3 minutes or so the icons show up and the task bar as well. I've run defarg, chkdsk, and cleaned up the registry using PC BugDoctor, and that has not helped. I have all the current patches installed, also the latest definitions for Symantec anti virus, scans don't find any viruses. Any help would be appreciated. Artie

Does this happen when you boot the computer, or after you login?

Type services.msc in the run command line in the start menu and see if there are any sevices there that should not be running. Also msconfig in the run command line and check that out for proccesses that are running on start up. A good web site for speeding up win xp is www.blackviper.com and look at the super tweaks for xp, He explains every service that can be turned off safely and what sevices can be disabled altogether. Every service is taking up ram and slows down the start up process. Hope this helps as it helped me speed up my pc tremendously! Steve

You might want to check your Event viewer for events that are happening about that time. The system is waiting for something and eventually times out. I had a similar problem. Mine took a good two minutes to start. Upon checking the Event viewer I found that Zonealarm Firewall had some corrupted files. I uninstalled the application and reinstalled it and have no problem now. There are numerous other reasons why this might happen as well. Look carefully at your system as it will tell you somewhere what the problem is.

Thanks for the replies, the desktop is blank after I boot up and login, I ran msconfig and unchecked everything except systray and vptray, rebooted with same results, I then checked the event viewer and there is an error on every bootup, "windows couldn't log the RSoP (resultant set of policies)an attempt to connect to WMI failed" Does anyone know what this means? Thanks Artie