On my WIn XP Home machine I am having some problems with it taking a long time to load ZoneAlarm the free edition and my AVG virus scanner. It boots up just as fast but for a bout a week its been taking a long time to load those two icons. Another thing is the internet will not work untill its done loading those two icons. It never used to take this long and its not my computer because it is a 2.4ghz P4 with 1gig of RD Ram. I have cleaned the registry, uninstalled a bunch of stuff, ran several virus scans, and then defragged. I have disabled everything I don't need in msconfig along with some services I don't need.

Any ideas why this POS takes such a long time to load these two damn tray icons?

The reason your internet is blocked is b/c zone alarm isn't letting traffic through until ZA is fully loaded. I had this same problem. All I did was reinistall ZA, update, and everything was as good as new.

Thanks. I updated it but thats didn't work. I really didn't want to reinstall because I have to retrain the damn thing all over again But I /did/ reinstall it and AVG. Now it boots up quicker.

You cant use the net until they load?

i used to have a problem kinda like this, it was windows trying to assign an IP for my network.... might help, do ipconfig as soon as you get in and see how long it takes?