Yes, I'm posting a "Help me fix it, I'm dumb!" article... yes, it pains me to do so, but so far I've had no luck fixing this problem.
My games take forever to initialize and load... well, anything that seems to have anything to do with DirectX does. Everything eventually loads, and when it does load it works perfectly fine, but some games take 5+min to get going. This is a problem that started popping up here and there about 2 weeks ago. Here's all my machine info:
WinXP Sp2 (DX 9.0c)
P4 3.0GHz HT
1GB RAM
120GB SATA HDD
ATI Radeon X800XL 256MB
SB Audigy 2
I get the slow as hell startup on the following games and applications:
-Star Wars Galaxies
-Galactic Civilizations II Beta
-3DMark05 (Benchmark Tool)
-Guild Wars
-AutoAssault Beta
-World of Warcraft (though by comparison to the others it's a speedy start-up)
-ATI Catalyst Driver Installer
-DirectX Diagnostic Tools (dxdiag)
I *just* replaced my video card yesterday, thinking it might have been the card crapping out on me (ATI 9800XT to the X800XL) but it wasn't. I reinstalled WinXP about a month ago too. Fully patched, virus scanner enabled, physical firewall.
Any thoughts?