>we've got a few machines here at work that are a bear to work with.
>sometimes when clicking the start bar, the start button will remain depressed for about 60-90 seconds before the popup comes up ( if at all ). the same happens when trying to follow a link in the start bar to another menu or when navigating direcotries with windows explorer.


What kind of machines are this? With how much of RAM? When you click the start-menu, is the disk still heavily reading? Could it be, that someone was editing the registry & changing the time, in which to show a menu? Check the system for viruses also, in case they are not really slow.