SLOW Startup

[Mark]

A couple of weeks back my XP based PC went from a 2 minute
start up to a 10 minute or better startup.

Worked with it long enough last night to determine that
the 'Event Log' service seems to be the problem. At
startup time, this little jewel jumps in and consumes ALL
the memory it can grab bring the system to a near stand-
still. After 10-15 minutes or so, it goes away and frees
up all the memory it initially grabed and the PC runs
nicely after that.

Question is, any advise on what's going on and the proper
method of fixing it?

Thanks

 

[Rich Barry]

Mark, check for trojans, spyware, adware and virus. You can use these
sites
http://housecall.trendmicro.com/

http://safespy.net/Spyware_Hunter.htm

http://www.lavasoft.de/software/adaware/

http://spybot-spyware.com/trojan.htm

http://www.spysweeper.com/

http://www.kephyr.com/spywarescanner/

 

[Mark]

Between Norton, Spybot, Adaware and TrendMicro ... it
appears my PC is quite clean in terms of
unwanted/unrequested software.

Is there a way to determine what is really running under
the SVCHOST.exe process?

I have 4-5 instances of SVCHOST running. It appears one
of these grabs all the available memory it can. Checking
via Norton, one of the SVCHOST instances was consuming
1918Meg of memory while all the remaining processes were
left with ~500Meg to share.

By unselecting 'Event Log' in the SERVICES option of
msconfig, the system boots up without consuming all the
memory, I'm not confident that this is a proper long term
answer.