New R61 taking way too long to start up and to shut down!

I have a ThiinkPad R61 with XP Pro, 2GB of RAM, T9300 (2.5GHz) Core 2 Duo and nVIDIA discrete graphics. Both startup and shutdown are taking far too long. When I power on the machine, it takes no time to get to the Windows log on screen. After I enter my password (or scan my fingerprint), it displays "loading personal settings" or something to that effect and takes as long as two minutes to display my desktop! My old Toshiba with a 1.6GHz Pentium M that manages to do the same in about 40 seconds.

There are no performance issues once the desktop comes up, until I shut it down. There are a few Services that either won't stop running or won't respond, but I'm usually so irritated at that point that I can't recall which ones in particular. I'm fairly certain they're Lenovo and/or ThinkVantage-related. Once I click End Now for those, it takes a minimum of 60 seconds to power off and often more than two minutes.

I have disabled all non-essential startup programs and also have disabled the Services that I know to be non-essential. I've verified that all performance settings are set to High Performance...but I'm not sure what to do next???

Any ideas on what's causing my issues?

 

try going to msconfig and try diagnostic startup and see if its faster just to test

 

I would have to guess that it is the Lenovo programs that re causing this massive slow down. They cause nothing but problems. If you can do without them I would reccomend you uninstall them(or at least the ones you can go without).

 

I'm assuming you are familiar with the clean install guides here like this one.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=188992

I'm also assuming you are using the factory install.

The last time I did a clean install of XP, I remember heaving a heavy sigh of relief when it only took 30 seconds to get to my desktop. Of course at that time I had not loaded any of the drivers.

After loading only the necessary drivers and software to run just the main hardware components (no user apps yet), my startup times were starting to get closer to one minute. After completing all drivers and just my necessary software my time increased to one minute fifteen seconds.

I have an old X30 that still has the factory preload and a ton of software that loads XP to the desktop in 45 seconds.

I'm guessing the difference in hardware from older computers to newer ones causes XP to take longer to load. My t60p has tons of hardware that my x30 does not, and all those drivers must take a while to read off the hard drive.