>Hi, Bhavbhuti and Dragan.
>
>>I mean I was looking at the HDD beating itself to death in both the cases. This is esp. true with XP, maybe I am wrong but I have noticed that it will give you everything, then slowly and steadily load things one by one slowing the inital stuff you are doing.
>
>Did you try disabling the Search agent? Take a look at KB article:
>http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;899869
>
>Who uses Windows to search for files, anyway?
>I don't really know if disabling Explorer (with BBLan, for example) actualy stops the cidaemon service, but it is a real hog.

I've had both search service and indexing service turned off already, and indexing disabled on all disks. TotalCommander is fast enough when I want to search for something - which is not too often, and I usually know a few suspect directories where to look. It's my disk, I should know.

As I said before in this thread, somehow a shortcut to my program files directory got inserted into my start menu, and that was the start of the trouble. But even after removing that (my %programfiles% still points to c:\program files, but in tweakUI it's set to an empty directory), it still took too much memory, and too much time at boot.

I'm happy now - it finally feels like I do have a 64 bit processor and a fast machine. Specially the speed of flipping between apps and desktops is amazing. Now I appreciate the suck level of windows explorer :).