Windows starts slow, shuts down slow, and other delays

[Niclo Iste]

OK i have a client who I updated recently but even before the updates he claims he has had these issues. Windows takes a minute or two longer to start anymore. Programs such as IE8, Firefox, and Yahoo messenger on first starting of the applications takes a full 45+ seconds to start up. However once those applications have been started if you shut them off and start them up any other time they start almost immediately. Shut down is also delaying. He claims it's 1 of every 4 shutdowns that it will suddenly take over 5 minutes to shut down the system. It's only a 4 year old system and has 1gb of RAM. I've done scan disks, and defrags already and nothing really has changed. I did a viral scan and a malware cleanup and it still hasn't improved much at all. Is there something I'm missing? I've already a year ago removed the multiple virus scanners so it's not any left over virus scanners causing conflicts. In addition he's using NOD32 so that shouldn't even slow the pc down considering. Plus it started bogging down about 6 months after that first visit. I also did a Hijack this and even checked it with sysinspector by eset and everything comes up normal especially since I removed anything questionable quite a while ago. Has anyone else had a similar situation? I could've sworn there was a post similar last month but I don't see anything that was the same.

[CCT]

Start, offline, with an msconfig and stop ALL startups and in services check the 'Hide all Microsoft services' box and then stop all the remaining from starting.

Don't forget to actually look at what is there. Anything weird?

Then start and stop a few times. How's that?

[Niclo Iste]

I forgot to mention I've done that too. This thing has already been pretty much optimized from my first visit. That's why I'm confused with this delay issue.

[MobilePCPhysician]

Run the hard drive manufacturers disk analysis.

[Ferrit]

I think MobilePCPhysician is looking in the right direction.
I have changed out a couple hard drives that just
seemed to be "SLOW" period. Nothing unusual showed up.
But a change of the harddrive and away it went.

[NooNoo]

There is always the old favourite, spybot sdhelper butting heads with the av/anti malware that's running. I assume you have checked for rootkits?

[slgrieb]

XP displays a really rare glitch where it sometimes fails to assign DMA mode to IDE drives and instead sets them to PIO. Seems to happen at random, and can be reset manually. Tends to happen after some updates and Service Pack installations, so I'd check it.

But, I'd still agree that an actual problem with the drive is most likely. I've always thought hard drive diagnostics were really reliable, but lately I've had problems with some errors showing up so intermittently that they were difficult to diagnose. You know, run the test 4 times, get 4 passes, then test again and get 4 fails.