Hi folks,

I have here a Dell Dimension 8300 that is severely screwed ... but I've no idea why.

Here's the story.

Yesterday, I ran Spybot on this machine and removed a number of entries. I ran it from Safe Mode in the Administrator account. I've run Spybot on dozens of machines, no problem, although I have to say that I've not run it from Safe Mode before. It seemed an easier thing to do.

Anyway, after I removed the entries, TCP/IP was broken. It was unable to pull an address from DHCP. I figured this was the old NewDOTNet thing and checked out the LSP stack. No New.Net, but there was a number of entries in there regarding McAfee's Firewall.

I uninstalled McAfee's parts.

During the next boot, the system came up EXTREMELY slowly. I mean, we sat at that "Windows is Starting UP" screen for five minutes. Then, after login, we sat at the desktop while "Radio @ Netscape" tried to contact it's service. Most items were open, but the Start bar was not visible and, although explorer.exe was running, it's parts could only be accessed through keyboard shortcuts (like WINDOWS-E for Explorer).

I rebooted into Safe Mode and it took the same amount of time to boot and System Restore reported that it couldn't start and to reboot.

So, I did a repair install. This took overlong, but it finally did go through.

Unfortunately, it did not solve the problem.

I asked Dell what they would do since the system is in warranty. They told me to nuke it.

I don't want to nuke it.

How can I find out more about why the system is booting so slowly? I have found that disabling the Ethernet adapter will allow the system to boot into Windows fine, albeit very slowly. Event viewer shows no errors. I don't see any odd entries in Services.

I'm stumped.

What's wrong with this system?

Cheers,

Mike Whalen