Windows logon slow .. Odd...

Tech-Archive recommends: Speed Up your PC by fixing your registry

From: Edward Chan (f22_r_at_hotmail.com)
Date: 07/02/04 

Date: Thu, 1 Jul 2004 20:48:46 -0700

Here's the problem. When I turn on my PC, it usually
would get onto desktop automatically without any wait
time. I didn't really do anything last night... After a
few hours last night, I turned my PC back on.... under
Win. XP, it shows that Welcome screen, then it makes the
logon sound the screen is still in Welcome. Usually it
would log on to my desktop, make the sound, then load.
But this time, I had to wait for 10+ seconds, then it
goes to my desktop and nothing shows except for my
background image. I don't know what's going on. I assume
it's an IRC virus I caught since the only program that I
had up and running was IRC and it's capable of catching
viruses that allow remote connection to be controlled by
other users using IRC.

Anyways, it shows my desktop and I just let it sit
there.... for a good 5 whole min. and nothing happens. So
I run up the Task Manager and close explorer.exe, then
run it again (explorer.exe) and poof, my desktop loads.
The bad thing is, I had to load up my startup
manually.....

Is there a way that anyone here can think of so I can
actually fix this so it will continue to log on normally?
I am thinking of replacing explorer.exe with another one
since I think it's explorer.exe's problem. Any
suggestions to this problem?