Two points

1 The hardware replacement was with identical models under warranty as I threw the ball in the pc manufacturers court. ie.. same model motherboard, same model cpu etc.

2. The repair has been done twice already, but that was a while ago.

I was thinking of trying the repair again as well, so will do and keep you posted.

Something just occurred to me - are you running any sort of anti Malware that is scanning your active memory (like RAM) at boot and shutdown time?

Just a thought - the behavior you described sounds like that....

You are right, it does sound like that.

No, I do normally have pestpatrol but everything except whats essential to windows has been turned off for months.... all the schedulers, all the update checkers etc. I have even removed all the tray icons except windows ones.

The only thing still on is Zonealarm v7. I took it off for a few hours and got hit by a virus, so its back on. But v7 has so many issues, its just possible. I will try removing it after the repair test.

I finally found some time to do a repair/inplace install. Once finished, I am stuffed. I cant log in unless windows is activated. Windows cant be activated because it cant connect to the internet. I cant fix the internet connection unless I can log on. I cant logon...

Safemode is disallowed until activation is done. I do have a legal copy, it was activated before and I have used the same serial number.

How do I break this idiotic cycle ?

You should be able to logon for 30 days before Windows won't work anymore. You should be able to..... There is a way to activate by phone. Did you get the option to activate during the setup?

Hang on...I'm looking.

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/wpa_overview.mspx

Does any of this sound familiar?
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/289657/

.....

Here you go. Scroll down until you get to United States.

http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/resources/vol/numbers.mspx

Let us know what they say.

Or this one:
http://www.microsoft.com/about/companyinformation/usaoffices/default.mspx

The problem is that its the one from home and the times I am using it 10pm-3am is not when MS employees are in the office. I have got it at work this morning, I will have to see if I can make some time to call them from here... I need to have the PC on when I do as it generates a different unique ID each time to pass to MS support.

As it turned out, you just have to type the id in on the phone- its all automated. SO thats fine now.

Next problem, Normal mode is so sloow. Each mouse click or key press takes minutes to register. And explorer dies very 10 mins or so. Safe mode is ok, but I cant do windows updates in safe mode.

I have removed Zonealarm, I guess it wasnt the culprit. I am laboriously updating windows, going to the pc every 5 to 10 mins and clicking the next thing.

Does anyone have any clues about the slowness ?

You're welcome.

Slow Computer? Check here first. It may not be malware.

No, I dont have any other firewall. I will reinstall Zonealarm as soon as i can. I have already scanned my pc with trend's housecall.... all clean

Update is not working. It says "Files required to use WIndows Update are no longer registered or installed". I let it fix it, but it doesnt work. I have rebooted in between - no go. I have just registered the wu** and msxml*.dlls - but still no luck.

Explorer, Browser etc are still very slow - minutes between each action. However, my application runs at full speed... so the problem is with windows apps.

please download and save startuplist

/zx/Merijn/startuplist.zip

unzip it onto your desktop, run it and paste the results.