Vista - Could a Firewall/antivirus cause slow startup times?

(not sure ifthis is the right place to post it)but i have zonealarm and i recently (last night) reinstalled Vista also im noticing and tremendous increase in startup time from my pc just by running 1 core not all four!
if this is the problem can anyone tell me another really good firewall that doesnt make it startup so slow

Hello Impulse Fire911,
Have you tried to enable all the cores ?. Try it and see if that makes a difference.
I have never used any Firewall except the Windows one. You just need to be careful with the sites you visit and your download content.
Hope this helps, post your results and good luck.

Vista with 1 core boot- 51 seconds
Vista With 4 core Boot- 34 seconds
yeah it does increase speed but im just hoping its not my firewall because its a good firewall ive had it since windows 98.

I would say that Vista booting in 51 sec is not to shabby.
If mine booted in 51 sec i would be happy.
If it was me i would leave well alone. If it ain't broke don't fix it.
You have to remember that any added software is going to add to the boot time, i would still say that 51 sec is fine.
Have you looked at the various boot times in the boot time thread on this forum ?, if you do you will see that yours is quite good.

eek i'd rip out zonealarm to test. in the past zonealarm has had bugs which cause really long startup and shutdown processes. like 15minutes long.

Za might have a patch or an update to fix it. but i remember my vista machine experienced this huge slow down due to ZA.

as a baseline, i'd remove zonealarm and see if it fixes it.

another really good free firewall is comodo, which is what i use. i use to be a big ZA fan as well.

Yeah with ZA installed i get about 111 seconds on a fast startup its just good to know thats the only problem still its a great firewall and protects a bunch so now i can feel great knowing the pc i built isnt faulty.

As long as you are happy with it, thats the main thing.
Good luck, and if you get any other problems, you now know where we are.

One thing you can do without making any changes is enable boot logging. On my Vista64 system when I first got it, I used PC Decrapifier to get rid of the trash. But my system was still taking 2 minutes for a warm boot cycle. Turned out it was still trying to load Norton av drivers, even though the software was uninstalled. I had to download Norton removal tool and run it a couple of times. That took about 40 seconds off the reboot time.

If you see in the boot log it's trying to load drivers and failing, do a search on those filenames. If they're not on the HD they can't be loaded, but the system will wait for the time-out before going to the next one.

i appreciate the help ill try that thanks