Slow Boot and Logon

Problem: The user reported that her machine was taking a very long time to initialize. She was running XP on a late model Dell system. It was taking up to 30 minutes to get the logon prompt and then another 15-30 minutes to paint the desktop after logon. Even booting into Safe Mode took a long time; the driver load sequence hung for about 10 minutes (would have been a hint for a less dense technician). Once up, I ran a virus scan and found nothing. I ran Ad-Aware and Spybot S&D which cleaned up a few things, but didn't solve the problem. THEN I noticed that a Cruzer 128MB flash drive was in a cradle, attached to a USB port.

Solution: I removed the cradle from the USB port and rebooted. The system came up immediately. Further investigation showed that the cradle was purchased with a different flash drive, from another manufacturer. The machine would boot fine with the other flash drive in the cradle; it only had a problem when booted with the Cruzer drive plugged in.

Someone with more time, or better sense, than me will have to figure out why this caused a problem. I assume it was some driver incompatiblity or loading problem during the boot sequence. The Cruzer drive worked fine when plugged in after the system was up.......