Windows stalls for several minutes when rebooting

Hi, I have been having this issue for a few weeks now and I'm not sure what to make of it.

When I attempt to restart or log off, all of the programs and windows close but then it just sits there at my desktop wallpaper with the taskbar still visible for several minutes. Sometimes it takes 6-7 minutes before actually rebooting.

I have tried manually closing all running programs and non essential system processes and then rebooting but still, it refuses to reboot immediately. There must be something going on that is driver related or operating system related, but I'm not sure how to go about pinpointing and solving the problem.

I have tried reinstalling the OS from different CDs and I formatted the partition the time consuming method.

When I reinstalled, the only things I installed were drivers (e.g. amd dual core optimizer, amd cpu driver, ati 5850 drivers, x-fi fatal1ty platinum driver, setpoint driver, and ethernet driver) I installed the dot net framework 3.5 and 4.0 before installing the ATI 5850 control panel. After installing only these few things, I went to reboot and it stalled for several minutes. I did not try rebooting before installing those drivers because honestly, installing drivers was the very first thing I attempted to do.

I'm running Windows XP Pro SP3 32bit.

Can somebody offer ideas of where I can begin to solve this issue?

Thanks,
-Neil

I would suspect a faulty hard drive and Windows is trying to read something and getting errors so it keeps retrying.

run CHKDSK /r from a command prompt, you have to reboot and let it run, it will take several hours. It will look for surface errors on the disk and relocate code that is in recoverable areas.