Am I even barking up the right tree?

[Lemon law]

I have had a variety of XP computers---but until I networked two of them together in an ICS
network, I have never really experienced the following problem.

With the problem being---the computers boot up at normal speeds---but once the windows wallpaper appears---there is a time gap between that time and the time the icon load.

In the host computer on the network, upgrading to 512MB of ram largely cured the problem,
but with the client computer on the network the time gap between wallpaper load and icon load can be up to thirty seconds---and the client computer has far more ram and faster ram.

 

[JackMDS]

If the Network it set to reconnect at Boot it looks for the Network at startup.

 

[Lemon law]

To JackMDS--who says--If the Network it set to reconnect at Boot it looks for the Network at startup.

I may miss your point---but it somewhat supports my contention--the computer MAY be looking for all aspects of that network between the time the wallpaper loads and the icons come up.

But one thing is fairly sure---the computer is not ready to do jackdoodley until the icons come up.

 

[Fardringle]

I think what Jack meant to say is that if you have network drives (or printers) mapped between the two computers and the drive mappings are set to reconnect at login, Windows is probably trying to reconnect the network drives before it loads the desktop icons and depending on the speed of your network, the computers themselves, the phases of the moon, and whether there is yet another "breaking news report" about Anna Nichole Smith's baby 😉, that could take anywhere from a few seconds to a minute or more.

 

[Lemon law]

To Fardringle,

Now thats makes sense and somewhat explains why the times vary widely---I do indeed share a printer. But bottom line--is there anything that I can do to speed the process?

 

[Steve]

There is a registry key that you can adjust that will prevent the PC from searching for all LAN resources on boot, but I can't remember what it is 🙁