Take any CDs out of the cd drive. Also remove any external devices - particularly those with storage. Are there any network drives mapped on this machine? Right click the My Computer icon and choose "disconnect network drive...you will be shown all of the drives currently mapped. Usually Windows does this slow folder behavior if there is a mapped drive and an active connection to a network other than the network where the drives are mapped to. Windows gets stuck in a loop where it sees there's a connection, tries to make the mapped drives available but then can't because the active connection has no route to the network where the mapped resources exist...it's not smart enough to see that the network it is trying to reach is inaccessible so it keeps trying because it assumes that since there's a connection it should be able to make the drives accessible in the UI.