Gurney -

I believe you said you're running WinXP but you're making reference to a 40GB hard drive. It appears that the 40GB is your system drive(?).

Something more like 80GB is about the minimum that anyone sells a WinXP computer with, since the OS itself eats up so much. Recollection is that the OS, in normal installations needs about 13GB(?). You can get by with a little less, by not installing everything; but by the time you add even a little in the way of other programs things will get really crowded.

The 1GB recommended for RAM is what's required for reasonably rapid swapping of things in and out of "virtual RAM" on the hard drive. XP opens a whole lot more than 1GB just turning on, and whatever real RAM you have will always be filled, with the rest of it going to memory page files (in TEMP folders) on the hard drive.

By default, XP will only use 10% of the free space on the hard drive as virtual RAM, so with a 40GB drive, 10 to 20GB full of WinXP permanent files, a couple of programs and some data files, you've only got maybe 2GB(?) of virtual RAM usable on the hard drive. That means that in order to load a program the RAM fills, then what isn't immediately needed is paged to virtual RAM, but if the virtual RAM gets full, something has to be overwritten by the next "page" that needs to be rapidly accessible. With limited virtual RAM space there will be a lot of accesses to stuff splattered all over the drive, instead of reading back and forth between RAM and virtual RAM, with the virtual part all temporarily in a localized area of the drive.

You can change the amount of virtual RAM (TEMP space) XP can use, although Microsoft warns that you shouldn't, if there's another option (like a larger hard drive, or moving everything except the bare OS to another drive). And sometimes if you change it, XP has a tendency to "default back" to the 10%.

In earlier versions, like Win98, the default was to use only 10% of the largest contiguous free space, which is one of the reasons that defrag was critically important for them. WinXP can jump clumps with its temp space, but it can still get whacked with the need to keep most of the free space out of the "run" processing.

It sounds to me like your boot, and program openings, are doing an abnormal amount of fetch and write (sometimes called "thrashing") during program opening. Once the program is open, the files it needs to run for a while may be mostly in RAM or temp space virtual RAM where they're expected and all sorted out, so the program runs ok - it just takes a long time to get loaded.

Just a guess, based on the usual practice of using significantly larger hard drives with WinXP.

John