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During boot up, I have no indications; the statement is a guess on my part . . .

After the boot process, a quick look using the bundled System Monitor tool reveals 100% CPU utilization, and a tremendous (Megabytes) amount of file system Dirty Data, for an inordinate period of time. Again, just a guess . . .

During the boot, I cannot hear the usual disk drive seeking going on. The drive light comes on, yet there are lengthy pauses interspersed between audible cues from the disk drive that something is happening; the dive just sits there for minutes on end. A little activity, then a big wait (several minutes), then a little more activity (maybe a second or so), then a big wait, on and on through the boot process.

I realize this isn't the fastest PC on the planet anymore. The 1 hour 45 minute time required to boot the machine is what leads me to believe some task is railing the CPU and preventing the rest of the processes from getting any CPU time.

Worth noting is that once the boot process is complete, things seem return to normal. As I'm typing this (and browsing) the operational parameters appear as expected. Even CPU intensive apps such as Winamp run fine.

What used to be a three minute boot process now takes almost two hours; the machine appears locked, but eventually, if given enough time, completes the process. I'm stumped . . .

The 1 hour 45 minute time required to boot the machine is what leads me to believe some task is railing the CPU and preventing the rest of the processes from getting any CPU time.

Worth noting is that once the boot process is complete, things seem return to normal.

In that case, ignore my suggestion about TaskInfo, since that program will only give you a report after MS-Windows finishes loading, not a report on the boot process.

I don't know how to diagnose why the box takes that long to finish loading MS-Windows.

With the additional info, I would guess your hard drive is about to die. The 123Mb is not enough free disk space, but it sounds like a hardware problem with either the drive or the controller.

Make or borrow a bootable diskette. Make sure it is read only. Place this diskette in the A drive and boot your system. What is your boot time then? If normal, then the above paragraph is probably true (although it could still be a boot sector virus). If the boot time is still long, then you could have other hardware problems (memory, system board, bios corruption).

If it boots fairly quickly off of the diskette then you need to have a bootable diskette with virus scan software on it to eliminate the boot sector virus possibility before replacing your hardware.

The 1 hour 45 minute time required to boot the machine is what leads me to believe some task is railing the CPU and preventing the rest of the processes from getting any CPU time.

Holy Disk Problem, Batman!

Although I'm just echoing the others:

1) Kill more files on Drive C: or move some files/folders to your other drives. You need at least 10% free space on C:. Period. For a 2G partition, even 300M is running low. Also, move your swap file to drive D:, E:, or F: if one of them is empty.

2) Consider moving to Win 98 and not being tied to the 2G Dos limit (if you can find a copy - ebay maybe).

3) Consider another disk drive. 40G runs about $70 here. But another dozen 2G partitions aren't going to be very convienent.

4) Buy Partition Magic (I think it's up to version 7 or 8) and use it to consolidate your 6G hard drive into one partition.

5) A new computer is a last option. Don't overlook it if you are going to spend money to fix the problem anyway. Unfortunately, you will almost certainly have to switch to a newer operating system.