XP Slow boot =(

I would be suspect of so many instances of smss.exe. This process is initiated by the main system thread and is responsible for various activities, including launching the Winlogon and Win32 (Csrss.exe) processes, and setting system variables. Have you considered system may be infected ?

I suppose the system could be infected but I do not think so because I have ran full scans with spybot, malwarebytes, and microsoft security essentials and nothing has shown up.

In Process Monitor, how many resources running, once you get booted.

After a clean reboot there are 50 processes in task manager and over 151k events in process manager... but that list keeps growing because there are many events happening.

I just don't really know where to start to figure out why this thing takes forever to start up.

Then I would Windows System Restore to date before this began happening or do a Repair-install, booting from the CD.

so i tried sfc /scannow, with nothing.

tried rebooting in safemode and it hangs at mup.sys for like 10 minutes before it continues

any ideas?

Here are some causes (mup.sys)
http://www.aitechsolutions.net/mupdotsysXPhang.html

I'd run chkdsk /r on your hard drive

Alright, I have been to that before.

So far, here is what I have done (with no success)

chkdsk /r /f

swapped the psu for something that i know works

smartctl -t long on the drive in a live linux disk

memtest overnight

sfc /scannow

None of which showed any errors and did not do anything to help the slow booting

I have swapped the HDD to another one and installed windows (to see what would happen on a clean boot) and it started up just fine.

The problem is I don't want to reinstall all of my stuff.

I suppose the only thing left to do from that site is Manual Registry Restore =/