Temporary hang on startup

Under XP-SP2 Home, the boot process appears to hang for a while (2 to 3 minutes) and then completes successfully. The notebook then works fine. This situation appeared all of a sudden. Checked for viruses and spyware. Did a repair install, all to no avail.

The Autoruns application doesn’t help because it just indicates what’s running but it doesn’t give any startup order nor identify loading times.

Is there a utility which could pinpoint the item which is holding up the boot process?

 

It's on a friend's laptop on which I installed XP over a year ago. He's been using Sygate and Avast 4.8 from the start. This situation popped up about three months ago. He's computer illiterate, so I don't think he added anything. He claims he hasn't, anyway.

Thanks for your replay. I'll post back tomorrow.

 

I have an above average technical knowledge without being an expert. Assembled my own pc from scratch and installed a number of XP's for dual boots with Vista and Windows 7 pre-installed.

I was wary of using Bootvis because of all the negative comments about it over the years, but I may give it a try.

 

Unchecked all items in the startup list => there was no change in the temporary bootup freeze

Ran Bootvis and followed instructions obtained from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sc6vDC0QbpE. There was no change at all either on the reboot. I'm back to square one.

Four observations:

1. When using Bootvis 1.3.37, the vertical brown line around which the "repaired" items are supposed to gather was not apparent at all in the Creates screen. On the other screens, neither.

2. It turned out that my friend's daughter installed iTunes on the laptop but he's not certain that things went wrong after that. Anyhow, I don't see how this could affect the boot.

3. As an afterthought, this year (or so) old laptop uses a SATA disk and I had to go through the F6 procedure to install XP. Could something have gone wrong with the disk later on? Probably not as programs would not operate as they do once the boot process is completed.

4. The temporary freeze takes place when the XP landscape appears (after the Welcome screen and jingle). At that point, there are no icons for two to three minutes. The laptop disk indicator light blinks very shortly once in a while. Then the icons appear all at once except those on the system tray. They then load one by one "normally"