What system spec is your PC Stu? That seems very slow indeed, and the CPU seems very hot. Is it an Athlon XP?

My main XP Pro based PC boots to the desktop and finishes loading everything in under 30 seconds. I make sure I keep the system as clean as possible , not installing junk, and keeping the registry clean with the minimum of items running at startup.

There are a number of things that can slow down booting. The one most people don't realise is the number of icons on the desktop. This can badly slowdown the boot-up time.

The next is having command queuing enabled for the HD. This HD technology doesn't actually give any real world performance gain and will make XP pause for up to 30 seconds during bootup. Disabling command queuing (from the Device manager IDE/ATAPI controllers) will remove this pause in the boot process.

Next is programs loading during startup. Even if there is nothing in the startup folder in the start menu there could still be a lot loading. You need to look in the registry at the actual list of programs being run at startup and delete the entries for any you definitely don't need. Things like the Quicktime or Real Player files are definitely not needed. And any program that can easily be started from the start menu should have a quick launch icon loaded at startup as that is pointless and will just slow things down and eat up memory.

Next is hardware problems. If there are bad sectors on the HD this will slow down the loading of Windows dramatically as the system will continue to try and read a sector from the drive for quite some time before moving on. The other is Ram. If some of the ram is faulty this will again slow the booting process or make the system unstable.

That is only some of the things that can slow it down, but a clean install of XP should definitely boot up in about a minute or less.

Windows 2000 was quite different. That took a lot longer to boot up. I seem to remember my last Windows 2000 system would take about 5 minutes to fully boot to the desktop. And the less said about the speed of Windows 98 the better!