XP slow loading on my acer 1641. Battery?

Hi,

I bought an acer 1641 a couple of years back and I did a fresh install of xp professional, xp is up to date (sp3 with all the recent updates). At first xp would take an unusual amount of time to load after the login screen (about 3min) but after that functionality was ok meaning everything worked but the slow start kind of bothered me. Yesterday I walked up to the computer and an ESD occurred between my finger and the keyboard. After that everything froze I could not type and I freaked out. I did a hard boot and on reboot (again slow loading of xp after login) the task manager would show 100% cpu usage for an hour or so. Something was (or is) wrong.

I have previously done the xp cleaning procedure before (about three times since I had a trojan a few months back), I run spybot religiously now, teatimer is always running so I am pretty much certain it is not a virus (unless it was always hidden). I have sort of an unresolved issue with IE, I am trying to uninstall and then install but it doesn't work=> when I go to windowsupdate IE7 crashes every single time (i do the updates automatically overnight). IE6 also crashes. I don't know how to resolve this nevertheless getting back to my problem.

Playing around last night and today I am pretty certain I have isolated the problem of the 100% cpu usage to the battery, yes battery. While leaving the laptop on I just removed the battery (plugged in of course) and the cpu usage dropped right away, when I reboot now it still takes about 3 min to load but at least everything is ready to go after that (without the battery on), which leaves me with how can I go about cutting the loading time. Could it be the intel/prowireless software?

A short list of my hardware:

Aspire 1641WLMi
Intel M725 processor
Intel graphics media accelerator 900
80GB Hard Drive
2GB RAM

Processes on task manager:

1XConfig
alg
csrss
daemon
EOUWiz
EvtEng
explorer
firefox
FramworkService
hkcmd
iFrmewrk
igfxpers
jqs
jusched
lsass
mcshield
MDM
MSCamS32
msconfig
naPrdMgr
NetDirectService
OprotSvc
PDVDServ
RegSrvc
RTHDCPL
S24EvMon
services
shstat
smss
spoolsv
svchost
SynTPEnh
SynTPLpr
System
System Idle Process
taskmgr
tbmon
TeaTimer
UpdaterUI
vstskmgr
vVX1000
winlogon
ZCfgSvc

By the way I have a dual boot (Ubuntu) and linux loads normally (like 20-30 secs) but I haven't gotten the wireless to work on the linux side. I would appreciate any help with this issue. Thanks