My PC takes upwards of 10 minutes to boot up properly. 3 mins or so to reach the desktop, but then the hard drive activity light won't stop and the PC runs VERY slowly for another 10 minutes on average: the cause, as Task Manager is showing, seems to be "lsass.exe" eating up 20-40% of my cpu. Once this 10 minute period is up, lsass doesn't touch my cpu usage and everything run's fine; only it is very frustrating to have exceedingly limited PC use for such a long time. Any help? Thanks.

I would suggust running a check disk and letting it fix any and all problems, that is what it sounds like to me anyway, if you dont know how then click on start type in chkdsk /f and hit enter, it will come up and say that it can not lock the dive, schedule on next restart, type in y and hit enter close that and then restart, it will run a check disk and if there is anything wrong it will find it, i had the same problem when installing, my comp keep on restarting but i let it run chkdsk and it did just fine.

There are four services associated with lsass.exe and most users (especially home users) do not need any of them running. They are: IPSEC services Net Logon NT LM Security Support Provider Protected Storage Type "services.msc" in run, and disable them. I suggest you visit the following URL for complete info: http://www.blkviper.com/WinXP/servicecfg.htm ========================================= There's a bug in XP that can cause your CPU to go to 100% and other operations (such as copying files, network connections or streaming audio/video) to suffer degraded performance when you right click a file or folder. Want to know why it happens and how you can work around it? See KB article 819101 at http://www.winxpnews.com/rd/rd.cfm?id=030923CO-Right_Click http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=819101 ================================= Try performing an advanced clean-boot of XP to isolate the problem: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=316434