Slowing Windows boot

I think this is a software problem so here goes.

On my main computer I had the home version of XP SP2 loaded, originally with two identical Maxtor SATA drives running in Raid1 so that theroetically one backed the other up.

A few months before my most recent problem one of those drives got corrupted somehow and was no longer in use. Before I could get around to that..a matter of a month or two later, Windows would take longer and longer to boot up. Normally I leave the puter on all the time, but periodically I'd need to reboot.

Make a long story short, performance deteriorated and finally XP would take over 8 hours to reboot, if at all.

Fortunetly by this time nearly all my data got backed up, and so the crash wasn't totally a problem for me.

I've been stuck with just my laptop for a while and now plan to get to the bottom of this...

Any thoughts?

 

Oh...and forgot to mention....along the way I ran Norton utilities/antivirus and Spyware Doctor and a few other tools and found nothing by way of virus or malware. The only other thing was in Processess I frequently had "taskmgr.exe" running and consuming large amount of processor use, but I couldn't figure out how to get rid of it before everything crashed finally.