Bootup problem - 3 minutes With not progress

Hi all. I recently started having an issue with my Dell E1705.

Some of my specs are:
Core 2 Duo 2 gig
2 gigs o ram
80 gig 7200 rpm hd
7900gs

Ok well my computer is loading up to the background fine in its "normal" time frame of about 20-30 seconds. Then it just sits at the background for like 2-3 minutes before loading the explorer.exe. It just sits there dead, I can run the system tray and see the processes and all that things running. There are 42 processes. Explorer.exe is one of them taking about 13 megs of ram so its not that explorer.exe is not running. I can go an run another one and cancel the one that is already there but it has no impact on the amount of time that it takes for it to finally complete the boot. Once I am in windows, everything runs fine and at normal speed. This includes internet downloads, games, or word processing. I have Norton and I ran a check and there are no Trojans or viruses. In the idle state, the number one process taking ram is explorer.exe followed by svchost.exe. Can anyone help or guide me in the right direct? Ive searched the forums as well as online and I can not really find anything similar to this. Also, a system restore did not help me. i was not able to return the PC to a previous configuration. ALso, right when it happened I was not able to "Restore PC to last known good config." it did nothing.


Thank you all so much for reading this Any help is much appreciated.

 

Your best bet would be a fresh clean install.

 

Also, try booting to your OS cd and choose "Repair" and see if it fixes anything or restores any deleted/modified files. But backup any important data first, it may overwrite some items.