Lag of response from Win98 on P-IV PC

Hi to all ... I'm Maxx, almost 31yo Californian who found some tools here before, read posts in the forum but now dares to ask a question
Back in the days when Win98 was created, noone really believed that there will be such thing as processors with a speed larger then a gigahertz.
But, since Windows XP crashed on me, system recovery doesn't work and I haven't paid HP yet to give me a CD to re-install I decided to go with Win98 for now (only fullversion I have).
I use an HP Pavillion a305w, Pentium IV 2.7Ghz with 320MB RAM.

Here's my problem - whenever I reboot the machine or just start it up, it takes forever to get the startup procedure all done - already minimized the amount of progs, tasks in msconfig to the neccesary.
Even when opening an Internet Explorer or firefox to browse the web, initially it takes a longa...ss time to get the window to open and typing to appear in real-time in the window and not with delay.
But ...once I opened one of them (in one boot-session) they open up as quick as lightning like they've been in a cache or something.

Did some search for adware and spyware but nothing fancy found there, my motherboard driver is up to date and so is directX.

Any ideas what slows me down ?