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[geekwannabe]

From day one, my PC takes forever to boot and Windows takes forever to load. It's been my guess that since I bought it from Dell Auction and it was refurbished (having been formerly owned and used by a large company for about a year), that there were still things left over in the registry from it's former life. I was right...there's evidence of Windows NT (I'm using Windows 98), and all sorts of references to other software that no longer lives on the computer. I downloaded a registry cleaner (register medic) that found over 1000 entries referencing non-existing folders and files. I managed to get it down to almost 400, but those are ones I'm just not sure I want to mess with. Even after that, when I go nosing around using RegEdit, I'm still seeing TONS of references to defunct stuff that the registry cleaner, for some reason, is not flagging. There's also been no improvement in boot or load time that I can see.....I've been backing the registry up to my C drive root dir before and after changes, so that I can restore the registry from DOS if I do something horrible and wind up totally crashing my system. Any other ideas as to why my system might be taking so long to boot and to load Windows? I've already culled my start-up processes to the minimum (I think). If there are other things I could look at first (that might be safer) before messing with my registry further, I'll check them out.... also, not really related, but any ideas out there as to why - even though Windows NT is not "active" on my machine (as far as I can tell) - I still have a logon screen that pops up right after Windows loads that says "Enter Login for Microsoft Networking" ??? Is there a way to disable this? hope i made sense.... thanks for any help Kathy