Programs opening very slow
 

I have this problem that all of a sudden all my programs open up very slowly. I look at the cpu usage and it never goes above 20% when opening the programs. Once they are running I don't notice the slow down anymore but it is very frustrating.

My comp stats are:
2.2 ghz
512 ram always have 200 megs free
80 gig drive with over 10 gigs free
geforce 4
Windows XP

I really apreciate everyones help.

First check for me is usually: how much junk is sitting in the system tray (lower right hand corner)???

You might have some low-level things running or waiting to run there.

I've herad fo this before. I'll check with "the guys" around here and see what I come up with.

How long since your last defrag?

I defraged last night and that is not causing it, I have also disabled almost evrything in my system tray except for a few essentials.

i would have a look in task manager to see what's running, anything out of the ordinary - specifically i'm wondering if you might have a virus of some sort??

maybe you could run some sort of benchmarking program to help isolate the problem?? such as sandra

did you install any new programs lately that might be to blame?

Well after taking a closer look it seems like some antivirus software I was running was scanning my hard drive continuously under a different login in for XP. After stopping that program things seem to be working much better now. Sorry to bother everyone with my stupid support questions.

run a complete system scan

I just fell in love with this program taskinfo2003 this weekend http://www.iarsn.com/
It's fucking great for this type of detective work.