WIndows XP Freeze during boot up

I'm having an issue where Windows will stop booting up as soon as it gets to the poit where it loads the wallpaper. It just stops at that point. I looked at task manager and only 22 processes are running, and the CPU is just occaisonally blipping to 5% and back. (so it's not locked up where the CPU is at 100%) It's just happy to stop at that point. I ran Norton antivirus booted from CD and it said no viruses were found. Does this sound like a virus issue?

 

Nope, sounds like an attempt to logon to a domain, or reestablish a network drive before parts of the system are fully up. Could be a slow startup of a firewall too. A defrag might help. Boot it up into safe mode then defrag the hard drive.

 

When I boot up in safe mode, I get a window that has says SAFE MODE in the corners but it doesn't go any further so there is nothing to click to get to control panel to defrag the disk.

 

A quick question. When booting normally, can you hit CTRL + ALT + DEL to get the task manager?

Also, you stated that you can boot with the Norton cd to check for viruses. Do you know if you have a FAT32 or NTFS file system?

Yet another question. What caused this? What was the LAST thing you did, that caused this issue?

 

I was able to get to task manager. I just figured out that you can use task manager to open some programs by typing the name in the new task tab. Then I did a system restore to 2 weeks ago and that got it back alive. I did install a program last week that updated me of new snow conditions in Colorado and gave a screen alert when an update was available. That was last week but apparantly it took a couple days for it to thouroughly crash my computer. I'm good now and I have learned my lesson.......again....