nVidia nforce drivers cause slowness

Hello - I am seeing so speed issues when I load my motherboard nvidia 6.66 drivers and I had a question about the IDE SW drivers. I have an
AMD64 3000+
Epox EP-9NPA+Ultra Socket 939 NVIDIA nForce4
CORSAIR ValueSelect 1GB (2 x 512MB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM Unbuffered DDR 400 Dual Channel
HITACHI Deskstar T7K250 160GB 7200 RPM 8MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s
Antec SmartPower 2.0 SP-500 ATX12V 500W Power Supply
GIGABYTE Geforce 6600 256MB DDR PCI Express x16 Video Card

My First Question -
I noticed after I install a clean build XP w/SP2. The XP splash screen is barely on the screen before XP is loaded. I am not using the Ethernet card so I don't load that driver but after I load the SMBus drivers and reboot I noticed that the XP splash screen takes a whole lot longer to load. While I know this is not a true speed test but I wondered if this is right. I wouldn't think loading the drivers would slow the XP bootup process. The little Knight Rider display thing takes about 2 and a half passes before XP loads and before the SMBus driver it takes about 1/4 of one pass. Is this something I should worry about? While the machine appears to respond fine, I shouldn't see a slow down after loading the nvidia drivers, right?
I tried the following - installed XPw/SP2, just loaded the ethernet driver for the built in NIC and then XP slowed down.

I then put a Linksys Nic and disabled the NIC in the BIOS.
installed XPw/SP2, just loaded SMBus controller driver and then XP slowed down.

What does the SMBus driver give me? Do I need it?

Thanks,
Nick

 

These drivers are Know to cause problems at least with my DFI Ultra B MOBO.
The windows Default is better, when Option to install appears just refuse & the windows driver will load.
If the Nvida IDE SW driver has been loaded already ya may have to reload windows to rid your self of it.