Delayed start up.

[happyjack]

I am running windows xp but my computer takes 4 minutes to go from the welcome page to any icons appearing during startup. During this time nothing is happening. I have windows washer, ccleaner,agv and avast installed and they are detecting nothing.
What is also puzzelling is that it doesn't always do this. Sometimes she will fire up totally normally.
Does anyone have any ideas?
Thanks.

[stevef]

There's a popular train of thought that two anti-virus programmes running together can cause conflicts. You might like to read this article:
Smart Computing Article - Clash Of The Antivirus Apps (http://www.smartcomputing.com/editorial/article.asp?article=articles%2F2003%2Fs1407%2F38s07%2F38s07. asp)

[green granite]

And use a registry cleaner to remove all the crap that has accumulated in there.

[BOAC]

agv and avast installed - I know nothing about 'Windows Washer' but I think you have told us the cause!:=

[happyjack]

No it has been doing it a year now, before windows washer was installed. Is is just like ccleaner, freeing up hard drive space.
Avast was only installed last week in an effort to increase the chances of finding the problem so running 2 anti-virus programs is not the issue either.
ccleaner has a registry cleaner which I have run but makes no difference.
As I said, it will sometimes start normally... I guess 25% of the time.

[Gertrude the Wombat]

(1) Remove all the crapware you've listed, and all the other crapware you've installed but not told us about.

(2) Clean up after them.

If it still happens, there's a reasonable chance that something is trying to find something on the network and failing, assuming that when you say "nothing is happening" you mean

(a) no disks are spinning
(b) no CPU cycles are being used
(c) there's no obvious continuous network activity
(d) but you haven't actually taken a network trace.

So, a next thing to try might be to capture a network trace, then look at it to try to find anything that is trying to access an external resource, then timing out when it doesn't respond, then letting your machine complete its startup.

[Tarq57]

What starts with Windows is likely to be one of the main reasons, and Autoruns is likely to reveal much about it.
2 AVs on a system is an absolute no-no. Some users "get away with it" for a while, depending on the combo. If they both detect malware at the same time, (which is the time you most need that protection) a tussle for control and system freeze is fairly likely, requiring a reset or restart, after which the malware, not stopped by either 'coz neither could complete the process, runs.
I suggest the following:
Download the following tools. Avast uninstall utility. (http://www.avast.com/eng/avast-uninstall-utility.html)
AVG Remover. (http://www.avg.com/download-tools)
If you don't have the install file for the AV you want to use (choose Avast! choose Avast! ;)) download that, too. Disconnect, uninstall both, run the uninstallers in turn, reboot whenever prompted, install the AV, reconnect, update.

[twiggs]

How full is the disk?
When was the last defrag?
How much RAM do you have and what is the size of your page file?
A disk integrity check and backup might be in order too as it could be a sign of impending failure.
Another tool you could try is Bootvis (http://www.softpedia.com/get/Tweak/System-Tweak/BootVis.shtml) which is an MS tool used to increase boot times.