Hope I am posting this in the right area, and hope it will be useful to someone having the same problem or looking into it.Scenario:I've installed Vista Ultimate a few days ago on a new machine, and tried out some stuff I'd not really been able to run on my old machines. After a few days I noticed the following:- Vista booted fine, all the way to the logon screen.- Vista asks me for my password.- I enter the password and log on.- The machine would "freeze" showing the "welcome" message.- Screen would go black for about 10-20 seconds.- Suddenly things would come to life, start menu would show, desktop background, etc.Analysis:Basically, the machine would "hang" for about 20-40 seconds after I entered my password. The HDD led blinks every now and then, but not nearly as active as you would expect it to during boot. I figured the machine was waiting for something, but had no clue what.I dug into it today using the MSCONFIG tool to try and figure out what was causing it, and narrowed it down to the "Workstation" service. Doing some digging on the net yielded some solutions, but none were acceptable or applicable to my situation. So, dug in a bit deeper.In the end I narrowed it down to the following. Several days ago I installed "Microsoft Virtual PC 2007". This adds a network component / item called "Virtual Machine Network Services". This component / item can be found in the "properties" dialog of the network adapter(s) in "Network Connections".Fix (kind of):Disabling mentioned component / item got rid of the delay as described above. When I log onto Vista now, the desktop shows right away and within seconds I am able to use the start menu. I've not been able to find a fix that would keep the "Virtual Machine Network Services" functional.As said, I hope this will help someone else with the same problem. It took me a few hours to figure out. If anyone is interested in more details, let me know.

Did some more testing. A friend of mine has pretty much the same system as I have and did not have the problems I was encountering, so I couldn't let it rest.Final fix:I've gotten rid of the startup delay completely while keeping the "Virtual Machine Network Services" active. The system I was having the problems on is build around an Intel Bad Axe 2 mainboard, using its onboard NIC for connectivity. When I installed the system, I downloaded the drivers for the NIC from the Intel web site. During installation of mentioned drivers, you are presented with a choice between "Drivers only" and "Drivers and Intel PROSet for Windows Device manager". I installed the drivers using the "Drivers only" method the first time. Today I reinstalled them using "Drivers and Intel PROSet for Windows Device manager" option, and the problem I was encountering before is gone.I'm not quite sure what exactly is missing when going for the drivers only option, but alas, this works, so it ends here for me, and maybe for someone else having the same issue.//c