[Chiquae07]

i personally had some junk problems like that. i personally would upgrade the amount of ram, but that wouldn't help out with start-up times.

i would personally go into the add/remove program tool in control panel and get rid of all the stuff you dont use at all anymore.

go out to bestbuy and buy ram. im dead serious. i got 1gb of ram for about 50 bucks on a sale kinda thing. this was aout 2 yrs ago. ram is dirt cheap these days its not even funny. also easy to install. i could list steps here:
1. unscrew steel or w/e your side panel on the computer is made of.
2. remove the panel
3. remove as much dust as possible, with paper towels, and hair blowdryer, gret that crap outta there.
4. push the two plastic clamps that hold in the ram sticks toward the motherboard, and the ram sound become somewhat free
5. remove the previous ram stick
6. insert new ram stick

-no need to remove the current ram stick as most computers these days have slots in them to allow for expandability-

norton shouldn't be too much of a hassle taking up your cpu and things of that sort. it might be other things as well. i currently have norton on mines, and it takes about maybe 2 min to start up. yet again i do remember having internet security from them, and it was a bitch if i had their firewall on for ram usage. that was with 512 or w/e ram though. never got the new security, just the systemworks, mostly for goback.

...yet again, i have an old azus motherboard, with a 3200+ amd processor, underclocked to 1.8ghz put to 12.5x multiplier, and currently volter to 1.600v, 1.5gb of ram. this computer is about 7 years old. i think the newest thing i bought for this was the newer cpu, and the graphics card to a 256mb agp ati radon something. it works for what i want it to do...

yes im a youngin, but it seems to me you have about 3 or more audio file managers loading up at the same time. creative, sony sound stage, itunes helper. those are only the basics i looked that that seemed unusual.

i could name a couple things you could try and edit so they don't appear on start up, but this won't guarenttee it'll go faster.

no need for these thigns at start up ---- adobe, quicktime player, daemon tools, microsoft messenger, the sony audio, creative audio, kodak easyshare, ipod helper, and ipod service, itunes helper, java updater, real player updater. those are only a couple that i could identify without going to google to find out what that process was for originally.

also looking around, seems like you also have all those google and yahoo, and party poker plug-ins for internet explorer. those take up space too.