When I boot up my laptop I have to wait for about 1-2 minutes for my NICs to come up in the taskbar. While I am waiting I cannot use the start menu at all, when I attempt to move my mouse onto the start menu/taskbar it turns into the hourglass until I remove my cursor from it. Finally my 2 NICs pop up in the taskbar and I can go about normally.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Attempted fixes:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Uninstalled drivers for both NICs, and updated.

 

 

 

Removed ALL items from my startup (i.e msconfig, Run, runonce, Startup, etc...)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So far nothing, my specs are:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Windows XP Pro SP1

 

 

 

Intel Pentium 4M 1.6ghz

 

 

 

512 mb ram

 

 

 

Realtek 810x Family Fast Ethernet NIC

 

 

 

Intel PRO Wireless 2200 BG

I'd guess the problem is the wireless card looking for a network, and XP being an [wagon] about it (ie, waiting until it's done, instead of having it load lazily). Try just deinstalling that and see if you notice any grand improvements. If you do, it may be time to see if there's any way you can force the thing to load later on.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

While it probably doesn't help, I did not think it was necessary to have those icons in the tray. You should be able to have working network cards without having them pop up, see if that helps :).

 

 

 

It may also be nice to hit Ctrl+Shift+Esc during startup to see what processes are using up cpu (check the processes tab).

Sounds like a dell....?

You should also update windows to service pack 2. This contains wireless feature updates.