Computer hangs for only 30 sec. after booting

Really weird. My computer just hangs, well, almost hangs for roughly 30 seconds each time it boots up into windows.

Once it boots up, I try to start, say, Internet Explorer, and it opens the screen but doesn't load anything. After 15- 30 sec. it gives the "can't find site" message or whatever like I'm not connected (except that I have DSL and am always on). I then wait and hit reload and the site loads and the computer continues on as normal.

But it's not just internet. I try to load a program and it loads up maybe the splash screen or part of the program, and then it freezes there for maybe 30 sec. until finally the computer "wakes up" and loads the rest.

I thought it might be something with the startup process, maybe a program was trying to search for updates and failing for the first 30 seconds? I selectively disabled a few things that I thought might be the culprit with MSCONFIG, but to no avail.

Any suggestions?

mine use to do the same thing. it was because the modem had to find a new ip address each time i rebooted. ill bet if you dissconect the modem and try to reboot all will be good. my problems all went away when i got a router though.

Interesting that you should mention a router, as we just got a new wireless router that has been acting up. I think that maybe it has to do with this recent addition.

With a NIC installed, XP searches for a DCHP server to allocate an IP address during the boot sequence. This can take up to 30s, and may be your problem.

Another similar problem occurs if you're using Norton Internet Security 2002.

The way tound this is to allocate your PC a static IP address (in the 192.169.0.1 to 192.168.255.0 range) under My Network Places > Properties > Local Area Connection (right click and select Properties) Select Internet Protocol and click properties. That's where you can allocate your IP address.

As your router picks up the IP from your ISP, the IP for your PC can be set manually, and can get rid of both the above problems.

Hmmmm,
The thing is, the router did work okay for a couple of months. Recently, we had a outage, or at least it appeared to be an outage in our internet service. I don't know if we simply didn't have any ISP, or if it just went extremely slow to the point of being unusable as I could sometimes get maybe 1/2 a page to load.

Ever since then, I have been having this problem. I don't use Norton Internet Security. Also, I tried that IP address thing and it asked me for a subnet mask, and there was also a field for a DNS server, which I have no idea what those are....

Thanks to anyone who has/will help me with this problem, and for bearing with my lack of ISP knowledge.

I've also known Norton Anti-Virus to cause windows to hang after it got into windows.

Okay, well I don't use ANY Norton products.

Do you guys think that it could be my new wireless router that I'm using. My connection is wired directly to the router, and I'm not using the wireless connection. From there the router hooks up to the DSL modem.

I don't know exactly what's wrong, it has worked fine for X amount of months, and now is suddenly giving me problems???