Try the following
You may have just ran CleanUp! on your machine
CleanUp!, with the instructions I gave you also clears the Prefetch folder
This is good to do about once a month
But you can run CleanUp! regularly if you want>>Every week
The prefetch folder is used to help speed up the loading of programs; XP will load programs it thinks you need before you ask for them yourself.
Of course, it will also load orphaned malware entries, so we cleaned that area also
As programs open they will be added to prefetch
Of course what you have running on startup will be added after you run CleanUp!
So bootup is a bit slower at first, but that increases on next bootup
Any programs that haven't been added to Prefetch yet make take a couple more seconds to open
Until the next time you open them
See if things speed up a bit on next bootup
