problems with winlogon...plz help

[xfilesguy]

I had been noticing tht my comp was getting slower and slower over that last 15-20 days. On starting the comp, it took a long time for windows to start and there used to be a lengthy period when the screen went blank and the cursor changed to waiting (just before logon screen appeared i.e.). Also, browsers seemed to hang for a min. occasionally before they came back to life when browsing on random web sites.

Now wat has happened is that the process winlogon.exe is taking up almost 100% CPU usage after booting windows. It takes an eternity for login to actually happen and another eternity for the desktop icons, taskbar, etc to appear. Even the taskmanager took a long time to come up then I could see that winlogon.exe was hogging all the CPU usage.

Somebody help me plz...this is pretty urgent

 

[Zoron]

Were you on a network and had some network drives mapped? Also, were you possibly connected to a domain?

 

[xfilesguy]

I was connected to the institute LAN via the ethernet card, which in turn was connected to the net thru a proxy server.

 

[Zoron]

Unmap any network drives and ensure you're no longer on the domain. Also, removed the proxy settings... they'll likely do you no good unless you're connected to the institute's network.

 

[xfilesguy]

Oh I got rid of the problem for now ...actually I searched for winlogon in my drive and found a pre-fetch file winlogon.exe-******.pf (some numbers and alphabet) which had the modification date and appx. time since when this had started happening. I used Cleanup to delete all pre-fetch files and since then the comp's been working fine.
Thanks for replying though...