Boot on Laptop

[sxs]

I run XP on my laptop.
On boot, it loads fine and quickly, but the toolbar on the bottom turns to black and it then takes 2,3 or 4 minutes before it is ready to use.
I have DoneAlarm Firewall running on boot and after the black bar at the bottom goes, the window telling me that ZoneAlarm is running flashes up.
I am sure there are one of you clever guys who can tell me if it is ZA that is slowing boot. Also I have AVG antivirus running. Both are the free additions.

[DevMountain]

I suggest running process explorer on boot to see where the CPU is being used. Process Explorer is better then task manager as one of the columns you can display is 'process history' which will show you the application using the most processor since it started.

You can get process monitor from here... http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx

[sxs]

Thanks and have done that. Next problem is that I don't have a clue what it means?