something must be causing a delay for everything to happen, meaing your computer doesnt lock up as a result of something crashing. could be some windows service or some program you installed. try turning off unnecesary services or uninstalling some of your programs. heres a list of services and explanations:

http://www.blackviper.com/WinXP/servicecfg.htm

In addition to the above:

1. If you installed any programs right around the time you started experiencing the problem, I'd look at those as your first suspects. As yobobyo said, see if disabling non-critical services and start-up progrmas (one at a time) helps narrow things down.

2. Open Task Manager and monitor the resource usage of your running processes. Can you spot one that "spikes" in CPU/memory usage at the times the delays happen?

3. Have you thoroughly scanned your system thoroughly for viruses and "spyware"? An unprotected computer can become infected in only hours (or even minutes) of Internet usage, and these malicious programs can definitely cause the sort of problem you describe.

Thank you for your help and tips. I will follow your suggestions. Anyway, let me tell you that I have been using Ad Aware and the Symantec virus protection since I bought this new computer. Further more, since I posted my problem here I tried to to something different that seems to work most of the times...After the starting up process is finished, instead of clicking immediately on the broadband icon, I click some icons offline like My Documents or My Computer and open one or two of its folders. Only after doing this I click on the icon to connect to the internet and everything starts working normally. I know it's not the solution but anyway I won't have to wait longtime as before for the programs to open and mainly won't have to make the shut down or restart the computer. Again, thanks for your kind help. Cheers

That is really strange...

Try what we've suggested so far and see if you notice any change in the problem.

This is just a theory, so if anyone knows whether or not this is possible, please let me know.

It's possible you could have several applications set to auto-update when the computer is restarted. When you connect right away, they all fight to get their respective updates. By not connecting right away, they may stop trying to update and turn their 'update' off till the next reboot. When you do connect, some may still get their updates, but others may wait until you restart your computer. And it may not be only applications you have installed, there could also be some malware trying to connect itself amongst them. Anti-virus programs don't stop everything!

(Does this make any sense?)

Makes Sense to Me.!!!but so does most everything else when it comes to a computer !LOL

Ah, right- Brazinha did say that the problem occurs at startup (a key point, and one which I missed before), so what you suggest could be exactly what's going on.

If you've got a lot of programs firing off auto-start components at bootup, it can take a loooong time for everything to initialize, even if you can't see anything going on. For example, I have definitely noticed a very marked increase in the time it takes a system to "settle down" after installing both McAfee's Security packages on some systems (Norton's equivalent package is no start-up speed demon either). Those two products definitely do connect to the Internet to do their auto-update thing, and other programs (which you may not even know you have running) will do the same.

There's not much you can do about it if it's something like Norton or McAfee causing the delay; you need those programs, so you just have to deal with it. What you probably don't need though, is programs like Quicktime or RealPlayer running their auto-start components; you can often shave some time off the start-up process by not having such programs set to automatically start when Windows starts.

I agree ,I once was called out to fix a computer that was on dialup ,because the internet wouldn't work,He could connect but he could do nothing ,Problem was that the Store where he bought comp had Auto windows updates set ,and Norton antivirus and 2 others ,all were downloading updates that would take abought 2hrs on dialup ,using about 90%CPU ,A
nd about 6 programs running in the background ,programs that they thought he might like to have quick axcess !!

Yesssss...That was it. The problem was the windows update. I turned it off and never had the same problem again. From now on I will do the updates manually. Thank you all (a special thanks for Caperjack) for paying so much attention to my question and for all your quick answers. Now everything works very smoothly. Also want to thank the webmaster of this forum for opening such an useful site. Cheers