This may or may not be somewhat related, I had a person with a computer issue using Win ME that would get stuck at load up right when the splash screen(Win ME) came up and get stuck there.
I was able to get past that by smple pressing "Enter" and or "Esc" with a 10 second count between the two which allowed the computer to show the Dos screen of "computer continuing to load files" and continued normal loading and operation to desktop.
Maybe you could try that simple effort in your case to see if that Can unlock the seemingly extra long "Stall" to get your system responding normally to finish loading to get to full desktop access.
The computer needed major maintenance in "Scandisking " +"Diskdefrag", which then afterward proved the general cure to the otherwise sluggish performance. The system only had 64 megs ram and a Duron 700 Mhz which later turned generally snappy to imput responses.
Now I thought maybe the virus checker would find something ,but I stopped it after it ran through 30,000 +files and fiqured this machine was simply overloaded as I quit running the 15+ programs running in the background and that maybe the system resources were at a limit. Could you state your system memory and how many programs you have running in the background as many there is a common simularity here?