The first thing you should look into are which programs are loading at startup. Here is a link that explains how to limit these programs: http://windowshelp.microsoft.com/Windows/en-US/help/83ec0ffe-ee04-4d53-8b87-25d1f05c954e1033.mspx Once you limit the startup programs post back with the results.
Jeff
Windows Outreach Team
Lately my laptop has been acting really oddly when starting up. It will first stick at the Vista animated logo for a minute or two. Then it will go to the next screen, hard to describe, but its that vista wallpaper with basically nothing but the mouse on it which I can move around. Every 1.5 minutes (more like 1 minute and 25 seconds, very consistent) it flashes the same screen but says "Please Wait" for a second, flashes black, then goes back to the blank wallpaper screen. I noticed it about a week ago, but then it took about 15 minutes to get past this stage and then actually start (once it actually logs me on, its like nothing ever happened). Then two days ago I had to restart it for some updates and it had this problem, so I turned it off for about an hour and then turned it back on and it took about a half hour to start up. Then today I had to restart again, and no luck so far... Tried leaving it off for an hour, letting it do this cycle allllllll night (but it went to sleep at some point, and screwed it up). I really don't know whats wrong with it, if someone can give me any ideas that would be great!
Oh, and it will boot up safe mode with the same kind of problem, only the pauses take about 5 seconds instead of 1.5 minutes. I counted the number of these things and there were 55... Which would mean an hour and 20 minutes booting up not in safe mode. This is getting pretty ridiculous, it needs to stop!
If there is any more information I need to provide to help solve this problem, let me know!
Chowhound
Comic Vine
GameFAQs
GameSpot
Giant Bomb
TechRepublic