[alnitak]

That's WinAMP agent, it doesn't use any significant CPU cycles.

You don't really give enough information to help diagnose what "slow" means. Deleting items from your Startup menu will probably only slightly speed up the boot process.

"Slow" probably means something is using up the CPU cycles, or disk access has become slow, or something is using up your net bandwidth.

I would advise you open Task Manager and see which process is taking up the CPU cycles. If there is something there you don't recognise it is probably malware and you will need to get something to kill it. You can minimise task manager to the tray and monitor it continuously.

You may want to defrag your hard disk, though in my experience it seems to make minimal difference on NTFS. Cleaning out the cr*p, like IE's cache and the temp directory, seems to do a better job.

[jdm]

Thanks for taking the time and effort to type all of that out. I arranged my processes in a screen grab below, from most usage to least usage. I wonder why there's so much stuff going on in the background (and how to kill it).

[jdm]

"Cleaning out the cr*p, like IE's cache and the temp directory, seems to do a better job."

CCleaner does a good job at this. I run it several times a day.

[ex-snook]

How do you print out the process listing in the Task Window so that you can check each one individually?
thanks,