Slow startup after system updates

After a "clean install" of Vista Ultimate I went online to "Windows Update"
and got some additional updates. I restarted the machine and during bootup
the system sat at a black screen for 20 minutes. No hard drive activity.
Then the hard drive suddenly came to life and Vista finally loaded up.

I went to ATI and upgraded my drivers to the latest version. Being prompted
to restart, I went ahead and rebooted. This time the machine sat at the same
black screen for 30 minutes with 0 activity. After 30 minutes the machine
finally loaded. I was a bit concerned at this point. I did a few resets and
they took less than 2 minutes. So this appears to only happen after I make
config changes to my system.

Now that my video card drivers were installed I decided to optimize a few of
the display settings. I swapped the primary and secondary display, and maxed
out the resolution on each. The following reset took 30 minutes, again.

I ran the Windows Readiness tool from both ATI and Microsoft prior to
installing. They both rated my machine in the "better" category. The
microsoft tool mentioned it didn't recognize 2 devices. My sound card and
some sort of device of my video card.

System Specs:
ATI All-In-Wonder X800 AGP
AMD 4000+
2GB of RAM
Audigy 2 Value

On Mon, 5 Feb 2007 17:52:00 -0800, Chris
<Chris@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote:

>After a "clean install" of Vista Ultimate I went online to "Windows Update"
>and got some additional updates. I restarted the machine and during bootup
>the system sat at a black screen for 20 minutes. No hard drive activity.
>Then the hard drive suddenly came to life and Vista finally loaded up.
>
>I went to ATI and upgraded my drivers to the latest version. Being prompted
>to restart, I went ahead and rebooted. This time the machine sat at the same
>black screen for 30 minutes with 0 activity. After 30 minutes the machine
>finally loaded. I was a bit concerned at this point. I did a few resets and
>they took less than 2 minutes. So this appears to only happen after I make
>config changes to my system.
>
>Now that my video card drivers were installed I decided to optimize a few of
>the display settings. I swapped the primary and secondary display, and maxed
>out the resolution on each. The following reset took 30 minutes, again.
>
>I ran the Windows Readiness tool from both ATI and Microsoft prior to
>installing. They both rated my machine in the "better" category. The
>microsoft tool mentioned it didn't recognize 2 devices. My sound card and
>some sort of device of my video card.
>
>System Specs:
>ATI All-In-Wonder X800 AGP
>AMD 4000+
>2GB of RAM
>Audigy 2 Value
Have you allowed the system HOURS to DAYS to complete indexing
(depends on number of files)?
Once it settles down, (re) boots should be speedy (you have plenty of
memory). Also, your disk may need to defrag after all the updates and
stuff :/

Steve U