Machine won't boot Windows properly, please help!

[FireDragon]

Please can somebody explain what's going on....

Most times that I now turn the computer on, it 'gets stuck' on the Windows XP screen, (the one just before it loads properly).

I normally have to turn off the power, then turn the machine on again. It will then <sometimes> load, but will still take a long time.

I have the AVG virus software on the computer, and have got it to scan the machine a few times, but even though it sometimes finds & destroys a virus, it has no effect on this problem.

I'm a bit worried that, one day, it won't start at all!

Have not got a great understanding of computers, so any help to alieviate this problem would be great.

NB Tons of disk space left, plus I do get it to do a defrag occasionally.

[126,7]

I had the same problem a while back. The computer just wouldn't start up. After multiple tries it usually did get going until one day it just didn't want to anymore. It was a fault with the hard disc and I had to have that replaced. So maybe you should start backing up all the info you want to save on the hard disc to CD, as I fear it might be gone soon.
Good luck

[Devlin Carnet]

Fire Dragon,
Have you scanned with Adaware and/or spybot also, if there is anything on that shouldnt be, these can find things that AVG wont.