Slow startup (~30 minutes) XP, worked fine for three years

[dcdomain]

Up until a few weeks ago, my laptop booted fine. Now it takes about 30 minutes for it to boot up, and afterwards everything runs normally. I refuse to restart now, so I always put it into suspend. Anyway, I looked in the Event Viewer and copied down all the Errors listed during my boot up period. There are a lot of repeats so I'm going to list the issues only once. I've been searching around for answers and haven't found anything yet. Just posting this in case others have experienced it while I continue my search.

DCOM

• The server {8BC3F05E-D86B-11D0-A075-00C04FB68820} did not register with DCOM within the required timeout.

Service Control Manager:

• The PMEM service failed to start due to the following error:
  The system cannot find the file specified.

• Timeout (30000 milliseconds) waiting for a transaction response from the BITS service.

• Timeout (30000 milliseconds) waiting for a transaction response from the AudioSrv service.

• Timeout (30000 milliseconds) waiting for a transaction response from the ShellHWDetection service.

• Timeout (30000 milliseconds) waiting for a transaction response from the Schedule service.

• Timeout (30000 milliseconds) waiting for a transaction response from the HidServ service.

• Timeout (30000 milliseconds) waiting for a transaction response from the Irmon service.

• Timeout (30000 milliseconds) waiting for a transaction response from the HidServ service.

• Timeout (30000 milliseconds) waiting for a transaction response from the TrkWks service.

• The Distributed Link Tracking Client service failed to start due to the following error:
  The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion.

• Timeout (30000 milliseconds) waiting for a transaction response from the WZCSVC service.

• 
  Timeout (30000 milliseconds) waiting for a transaction response from the W32Time service.

• The Windows Time service failed to start due to the following error:
  The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion.

• Timeout (30000 milliseconds) waiting for a transaction response from the winmgmt service.

• The Security Center service depends on the Windows Management Instrumentation service which failed to start because of the following error:
  The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion.

• Timeout (30000 milliseconds) waiting for a transaction response from the wuauserv service.

• The Automatic Updates service failed to start due to the following error:
  The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion.

• The Access Connections Main Service service depends on the Windows Management Instrumentation service which failed to start because of the following error:
  The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion.

• The Windows Firewall/Internet Connection Sharing (ICS) service depends on the Windows Management Instrumentation service which failed to start because of the following error:
  The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion.

• The Telephony service failed to start due to the following error:
  All pipe instances are busy.

• The Remote Access Connection Manager service depends on the Telephony service which failed to start because of the following error:
  All pipe instances are busy.

• The Network Location Awareness (NLA) service failed to start due to the following error:
  All pipe instances are busy.

 

[Skeeedunt]

Not sure what to make of the errors, but sudden crawling boot times can indicate a failing drive. Have you run a full surface scan on the hard disk?

 

[Smilin]

one or more of those looks like damaged files.

Run a chkdsk /f on the drive then when complete pop back to a recent restore point. If this fixes it but the problem occurs again do a chkdsk /R on that drive.

 

[dawks]

As said previously, it could be a problem with the physical harddrive (dead sectors), or a corrupt file.

Try chkdsk /f as Smilin suggested, and if that doesnt help, try SpinRite. It can take bad sectors out of the equation and make a drive thats slow and error prone, run like new again.