Win. Explorer slow to open?

[g3w]

Hey there.

Am having an issue with XP Pro whereby when I click the quicklaunch button to open Explorer, it can take up to 40 seconds to load.

All other programs I am running (just Outlook, Opera, IE and Kazaa, Word) open fine, it only seems to be Windows Explorer that is experiencing this problem.

Its a Celeron 433, 320Mb Ram, Asus P3B-F mobo, 9.1Gb SCSI HDD on an Adaptec 2940AU controller.

I am also running Seti@Home, command line client.

I used to have Windows 2000 installed on this same machine and with the exact same configuration (ie same programs and specs) and had to probs at all.

Any ideas? It does seem that if I stop running Seti@Home then explorer seems to open faster, but I did not have this issue at all with Win2k. Maybe just the difference in OS's somehow causing it to not function properly ?

later...
G3W

 

[g3w]

just to add

just to add some more info...

So I click on Win. Explorer icon, theres no discernible increase in HDD activity, mem usuage doesn't really change, and there is no real increase in network traffic either.

So i click on the icon and start the loading.. in the mean time (as i said i have about 40 seconds to kill.. ) I can click on the IE icon, the Opera icon and the Word icon and all 3 will be opened and I can use them as per usual before Win Explorer is opened.

So to me it doesn't seem like its Seti@Home that is causing the problem, as these other programs can reclaim CPU usage back from Seti in order to load as per normal.

hmmmm

G3W