This is new install of XP (less than a month). Recently something happened where it now takes over 2 minutes to boot up to the desktop. A large majority of this time occurs after the xp splash screen and login screen where my background picture actually comes up, but there is no taskbar and no icons on the screen, only the background. I timed it last night, and it was about 90 seconds from when the background picture comes up until the taskbar and icons appear! I've done spyware scans (ad-aware, spybot, windows defender), anti-virus scans, and made sure all my drivers are up to date. I've cleaned out my startup folder, and stopped unneeded and unwanted services from booting up. I even downloaded and used winboot (or whatever that software is that M$ no longer supports that is suppose to speed up your boot time). I "optimized" my system with it, but it still takes forever to boot up. I know my computer is fast enough......

E2140 @ 2.66 ghz
2 gig's RAM @ 800
120 IDE hard drive (I know, it's slow, will be getting 7200.10 drive soon)

I just don't think it should take 2+ minutes to get into XP. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

What has changed prior to this error happening?

Sounds like it could be a hard drive issue.. a slave drive instead of a master or primary.

Go to Start - Run -type MSCONFIG and disable all, restart your computer and see if the issue is still present.

Run a registry cleaner

check out if your hard drive works in PIO mode (the slow mode). if it does work that way change it to ultra DMA mode (the fast mode).
u do it by going to device manager and check out the ide ata/atapi controlers option.

hope this helps.

check network setting