Start up Slow Down

My laptop is taking ages to start up. It gets to the desktop loads the icon, loads taskbar icons and loads some of the system tray icons. It loads all but Dell Quick set and the icons for the network connections, these load after a few mins.
When I am in college it starts up ok, could this have something to do with the wireless network card?
Sophos and Spybot don't find any problems. Someone suggested turning off several things in MSConfig / Startup, did that and it returned to normal for a bit.
Anyone got any ideas? I'm going to reinstall Windows anyway but would like to know whats causing the problem if it come up again.

Are you using WinXP?

Hop onto Run, type in "MSCONFIG". Move along to the startup tab and untick everything except maybe your antivirus and whatever.

try tunexp

also download and run bootvis it will defragment and optimize your driver loads for boot speed.

It might be a sign of a failing network card or a process that is expecting an ip address and not reciving it. I recently had a card go bad on a work desktop and it would sit at the wallpaper and take 2min for the rest of the desktop to load all because the card was still polling for an IP address.

Where would I get TuneXP?

If you type tunexp into google, this is the first result:
http://www.driverheaven.net/dforce/default.php
You just need to click on download.