WTF is bogging down my Windows XP Boot???

[yabanci]

I put a new system together a couple of weeks ago and Windows XP booted very quickly - 2-3 of the status bars, then the welcome screen and loading of system tray programs. I never timed it, but it was fast.

I just replaced the stock HSF with an aftermarket HSF and the temps are better, but now for some inexplicable reason it's taking forever for windows xp to boot. It still takes about trhee of the status bars, but then the screen goes black for a little while, then the welcome screen comes and seems to pause, then the screen turns all blue and seems to pause, them finally the system tray programs start to load (slowly). Much of the time the hard drive activity light is not flashing. The strange thing is that once it has finished booting and I run the Sisoft Sandra benchmarks, the results are equal to or better than they were before I made the change, and it's running cooler. So it doesn't seem like I've lost performance, it's just the windows xp boot that seems to have a problem.

Any ideas what is happening here?

AMD XP 2500+ Barton @ 2.155 (11x195)
Epox 8RDA+
1x512 Kingston Hyperx pc3200 ddr400
maxtor 160gb 8mb cache
Windows XP home

 

[Shooters]

Try running BootVis. It might give you some insight as to what's going on.

 

[yabanci]

Thanks for the tip. The bootvis program didn't give me much insight because I really didn't understand the data, but I ran the "optimize system" function and now I'm getting boots under 30 seconds again, whereas before It was closer to 3 minutes. So it seems to have solved whatever problem had occurred.

 

[nabeel]

i ran the bootvis util a while ago, and it slowed down my entire system but it did speed up the boot, so i had to format. mine takes a while after the 'loading personalized settings' screen, but after that every loads up/works all nice and quick