XP loads without Icons. . . but only sometimes.

[internetlad]

So the issue i'm facing is that I'll boot up XP pro, about a year old and almost never goes on the internet (maybe a couple times in the 2 years) so I highly doubt it's any sort of infection. The issue occurs after i log in and about 25 percent of the time XP loads with no icons. It only happens 25 percent of the time, and i can't detect any other issues after it loads successfully.

I checked eventvwr and there are no errors, it just seems like the whole thing stalls out.

any ideas on why the issue is intermittent and what i can do about it?

 

[internetlad]

it seems like a program loading at startup was causing the hang, I stopped some of them from loading at startup and it fixed itself. The culprit may be Dragon Naturallyspeaking but i'm happy with it just loading.