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Have you checked your screen Color Quality settings? As in it might be set on 16 bit rather than 32?

That's the thing. It's stuck on 16-bit. The box is grayed out, so I can't even select 32-bit (but wouldn't this be because the drivers aren't installed yet?)

Did you install additional new programs such as anti-virus that might be causing a resource problem on boot up?

Nope.

If so you may have a RAM issue. XP is turtle slow under 500MB of SDRAM. Have you tried a selective start up shutting down a bunch of non essential programs to see if one is holding it off?

When they got the PC new 3 or 4 years ago, it was very fast, even with just 256MB RAM. So I'm not sure what slowed it down. It is not used that much. Maybe once or twice a week for a half-hour to an hour each time.

Last one is are you using AOL software such as connect software? Just trying to help.

Nope. Buckeye Cable modem. No resource hog software like AOL is on there.

Thanks for your post. I appreciate it very much.

Sounds like the video drivers are missing then. You can go into control panel, click on System, click on hardware then click on device mamager, click on Display Adapters and see if it list a vidio card. Should be something maybe like S-3 Pro-Savage etc.. Try clicking on properties from there and updating drivers. It souds like and this is a guess there was a video card CD that came with the computer or someone had changed it out and it needs the drivers. I know what your talking about though and it is weird looking.

If you get the drivers installed you need to buy a 512 stick of RAM and that should clear up all the speed issues. 256 just barely runs XP it is the bare bones minimum recommended. For cost reasons many manufactures put in just that. 512 would be my minimum. I run 2000 on my laptop and 768 on my desk top.

One more thing after drivers are installed do a disk scan and defrag. If you have been using W/98 and are not used to XP it is a completely different set up. Fragmented files could slow it down considerably but the RAM is an issue.