Recently, my girlfriend managed to fix up an old Windows XP laptop that I thought was broken beyond repair (I was quite impressed!), and left me to deal with the software side of things.
I stripped it down to the bare minimum, installed updated drivers, got rid of old documents and thing like that, and ran Windows Update. That was fairly typical; I do this all the time when fixing up old machines.
Anyway, prior to running Windows Update, start-up was pretty fast and normal, no hangs or anything. After updating, whenever I boot it up now, the system tray first loads the volume control then waits an unusually long time before displaying the Wireless Network Connection tray icon.
It hangs the explorer.exe process, making it really slow to open new windows and things like that.
Windows Update did have a driver update for the device, which is what I thought the problem was so I did a "roll-back driver," but it hasn't had any effect.
There are no programs being run on start-up (all disabled with CCleaner) and relatively few services, so the only things that should load on start-up are the volume control and network connection.
Any ideas?
Edit: I was able to at least find out what processes are being loaded, but no idea why it's taking so long.
Immediately after booting up, these are the processes loaded:
After about 2 minutes, the wifi appears, explorer.exe is running normally and there are 30 processes:
(Disregarding MSPaint and Task Manager processes)
I don't know if this new information is relevant to my problem, but I hope so.
