My system is a 1.5GHz Centrino notebook (Toshiba) with 512mb RAM. It
came pre-installed with XP Home OEM edition. It used to boot like
lightening.

I recently upgraded to XP Pro, because I needed IIS for local web-dev
/ debugging. Now Windows boots, loads the first few startup
applications, then hangs for approx. 2 min before continuing to load
network settings, etc. Very annoying!

I don't see anything out of the ordinary in the Event Viewer (no
errors or warnings) and nothing out of sorts in the Device Manager
either.

Has anyone experienced this, or able to offer some advice for tracking
down the cause of this 2 minute pause?

i.m having a similar problem, ever since i put SP2 on my pc i have had to
wait 2mins after every restart before i can use any programs, files will open
but programs just won't load. then after the 2 mins is up everything i have
tried to do happens all at once. It's obviously not a hardware problem cos my
pc is very different from yours? anyone got any ideas?