Serious bootproblem

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Hi,

I have a fairly new system (8 months), using an AMD64 dual core processor
with 4G internal memory. As operating system I use XP Home/SP3.

I noticed that booting the system takes a lot of time (2 -3 minutes). I
often gaze at the picture of my desktop waiting for something to happen. All
the time I see no icons on the desktop, nor is a taskbar available.

The previous week I bought myself a HP Deskjet D2560. And because I was not
paying attention during installation a lot of junk was installed on my
harddrive (which I deinstalled yesterday). Today I started up XP, and could
not make it do anything. Everything I do, like starting the taskmanager,
takes more then 5 minutes. I'm not able to do anything. I can not start a
browser to look on the Internet for solutions.

I'm rather at a loss, and considering to reinstall the system. But me thinks
that a daunting task, as all the drivers need to be gathered, all software
needs to be installed and the like. So I was hoping for some pointers to do
before I wipe the hard drive clean.

Macamba
.