Applications starting very slow

[merlin_the_magician]

For some reason, my system is getting a little slow. Not that it is performing poorly, but it seems that starting up applications is taking longer every day.
For example, Word and Excel (office XP version), take far over 10 seconds to start.

I have a system that is rather clean, i do not have dozens of programs and applications running in the background, except for Norton Antivirus and Norton Personal Firewall) so that is unlikely to be causing this.
I deleted all temporary files, defragged (with DisKeeper), ran Bootvis, toroughtly scrubbed my registery, but still, it seems quite slow when starting applications.

What about it? :confused:

[Mr Snatcher]

Nortons could be the reaon why, check for rtvscan, and look at the process %

[merlin_the_magician]

eeeh... what is rtvscan?
checked taskmanager, noting strange over there, all events at 0%

[PhilEnfield]

If you are running Norton AV, this might be your answer :

http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/ent-security.nsf/d04e6f2f2dfad5de88256c910079502c/845f77881410fac588256c940061ee1e?OpenDocument&src=bar_sch_nam