Order (priority) in witch programs start

Can anyone point me in the right direction?? my virus program used to be one of the first programs to start, Now it is starting a good 20-40 seconds after system starts, I know seems trivial but I am concerned something may be
loading first. (system has been slowing down as of late ) run Ad Aware and
Spy Bot Search and Destroy all show clean even ran Hi jack this and it's all clean too. I am lost as to what may be happening but thought some thing may have changed the sequence in witch things start. I know I am grasping at straws here . Any suggestions?? or help apreciated
thank you
Herb

 

Have you tried placing this program shortcut into your start up folder???


~LuMa

 

it is already listed, but yea I checked that too

 

Cannot see in your signature what operating system you are using, but maybe these links can help you understand the startup order:

Startup order in Win9x/WinMe
Startup order in WinNT/Win2k/WinXP

Usually AntiVirus installs itself as a service that loads at machine-startup, and then loads a client-application after user-login that controls the service. Guess it is the client-application you want to start before the other applications. Maybe consider moving it from HKEY_USER to HKEY_LOCAL