Peter wrote:
>>the system has become lethargic with lots of disk activity on boot
>>up - in other words, very slow operation.>>


Check how much free space there is on your C-Drive.

One little-known cause of slowdowns is due to an old utility still built 
into XPnamed "Dr Watson".

This is a diagnostic utility of little use these days, which writes a log 
for every system error. You don't usually see this unless you go looking 
for it. Over time, if there are system errors such as you report, this log 
can eat up huge amounts of your C-drive until it becomes full and may 
partly account for some of the HD activity at bootup.

Dr Watson is enabled by default. Its log is buried deep within Docs and 
Settings, under default user I think/Application Data/Microsoft.

It has been known to cause significant system slowdowns. It is not easily 
disabled.

Here are the instructions for disabling it:

"Dr. Watson by default is always running on computers running Microsoft 
Windows NT. To disable Dr. Watson remove it from the registry.

Open the below folders and keys.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\
Software\
Microsoft\
WindowsNT\
CurrentVersion\

Locate and delete the key AeDebug."

Don Penlington

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