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My XP can boot in normal mode but lags incredibly on the login screen and after logging. I suspect an app is eating up more ram then the comp has (256mb, which was great 7years ago).

I booted up with safemode and it took a long time to boot. Like 5mins. Normal logins are fast, like <= 40seconds. What is the problem? It mentioned something about registry being recovered but i havent found the reason why this comp is having problems.

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What part of the boot takes long when booting to safe mode? – Tom Wijsman Aug 12 '10 at 13:50
Is the problematic machine connected to a network? – Andreas Aug 12 '10 at 19:46
Andreas: Yes. Wired. – acidzombie24 Aug 13 '10 at 8:30
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Is this a recent development or has it been getting gradually slower? Everything you do with this machine is bound to be somewhat slow given the low amount of physical RAM; officially the minimum is 64 MB (128 MB recommended), even with SP3, but I sure wouldn't want to run with that. Safe mode is always a lot slower since it's running 16-bit drivers for everything. Since the registry keeps growing over time, you may have reached a point where it just won't fit in memory any more without a lot of paging, so removing junk and cleaning it up might help. That could also explain the apparent registry corruption. Trouble is, if it is the registry size, you might not be able to get this computer to do much of anything until you add some RAM.

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I see. Eventually it loaded and the problem hasnt reappear so hopefully i dont need to do anything more. Note, as mentioned in Q it has 256ram. Not noted is SP2 – acidzombie24 Aug 13 '10 at 8:33
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Use "Safe mode with command line". Watch the drivers load. See where it hangs. Edit your question above, if this doesn't make the solution obvious.

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"Safe mode with command line" isn't DOS, it's safe mode loaded with cmd.exe instead of explorer.exe. As a matter of fact, if you go in there and type explorer.exe, it will load and be the same as regular safe mode. – Hello71 Aug 12 '10 at 14:55
Absolutely right, but it also lets you see every driver loading and where the process gets stuck, because there's no graphical screen. – CarlF Aug 12 '10 at 20:29
Luckily it eventually loaded and the problem hasnt reappear so hopefully i dont need to do anything more. – acidzombie24 Aug 13 '10 at 8:33
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