From: "Frank Haber" 

The saga continues:

1. On the desktop machine, other permissions things were evidently afoot.
Uninstalling a trial version of Ewido brought true cardiac arrest - upon
the required reboot, the machine booted through into Administrator (no pw
prompt), and I began to get the deadly (IE6 establishing preferences, etc.)
box you get on a new machine.  But the gods were kind.  My main profile was
fine.  I quickly copied same to a dummy and went on with life.

2. Back to the slowdown.  Through its life, off and on, SEVEN USB and fw
external HDs have been attached to this Dell - drives E: through K:.  Some
had indexing service enabled.  The sys eventlog showed a 30 second timeout
or two waiting for cisvc, apparently on drives that weren't there.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/833228/en-us

seems to say that SP2 should have fixed this - my QUERY.DLL is later than
the one in the hotfix.  But noooooo.*  I luckily had all the HDs in
question here this week.  I hubbed up, plugged all in, and made sure
indexing was off on all.

Things are MUCH better now on boot.  More later.  Hey. maybe this machine
will make it through another year without a rollback or reformat.

*(or perhaps my boot problem was only distantly related to "removable
memory,"
whatever that is.  I've only seen the 100% CPU leak thing a couple of
times, and I'm not sure on which machine.  In any case, a forest of
ever-changing external HDs is probably a dubious idea on XP at present.
Sorry, Adam.)

--- BBBS/NT v4.01 Flag-5