Major start-up degradation in Vista Basic

My Gateway ML3109 runs lean and clean with only Office 2003 and no startup programs listed in Defender Explorer. Recently it has begun to slow down signifcantly on startup.

I found errors logging in the Diagnostic-Performance>Operational Event Log, usually with a Critical 100 Event about startup degradation, accompanied by multiple Errors about indiviual apps/drivers taking longer to complete resulting in performance degradation in system start-up process. Most recent are Event 105 "Foreground optimizations (prefetching) took longer to complete, resulting in a performance degradation in the system start up process," Events 102 "This driver took longer to initialize, resulting in a performance degradation in the system start up process": HdAudAddService, PptpMinport, Ndistapi, NdisWan, AgereSoftModem; Events 101 "This application took longer than ususal to start up...": LogonUIxe, mmc.exe, svchost.exe, etc. Each time it seems to be different services, drivers and applications which are delayed and they individually troubleshoot ok.

I was advised by Gateway to do a clean reinstall which I have done twice with no change in the situtation, leading me to believe it might be a setting in the Boot or BIOS which is incorrect. It is the same with or without my Avast antivirus. Any help would be much appreciated because this is ruining what was once a fast notebook.

Do you think you have spyware or a bug? I would try spybot search and destroy before anything drastic. It may take care of the problem. Also, I found ccleaner can repair registry corruptions that can cause slow downs.

Download CCleaner 2.10.618 - FileHippo.com

Download Spybot Search & Destroy 1.6 - FileHippo.com

No, any virus issue would have been settled with clean reinstall. I also ran Avast boot scan and regularly clean up with CCleaner disk and registry cleans, then Auslogics disk and registry defrags. Spybot was buggy last time I tried it.

gregrocker said:

I found errors logging in the Diagnostic-Performance>Operational Event Log,

Click to expand...

How do I go about finding this? I've been suffering from some slow boot ups, even after cleaning the PC (defragging, registry cleaner, ccleaner, disk cleanup etc...) and still doesn't help.

I found it by right clicking Computer, then left clicking Properties, then clicking on the Vista Performance score link which opens an Advanced Panel, then clicking on Advanced Tools on the left list. The first one listed then is Check Performance in Event Log which opens the log tree to Diagnostics-Performance>Operational. You can also find it in the Tree which opens under Computer>Manage>Event Viewer. Previously I had only looked at Administrative View up at the top of tree, but these Performance issues were never listed there for some reason.