Start-up time was 1 minute, now it's 5-10 minutes?!

As far as I know, Catalyst Control Center is a video card supplemental application available for download from your ATI video card manufacturer (Sapphire, Asus, etc). It is not the driver. It is an add-on doo-dad. It provides some advanced functionality that I don't need, so I quit using it--3 or 4 years ago.

I don't know if it insinuates itself into services. I have no reason to believe it does, so I don't know if it can be defeated in Windows services.

If you are heavy duty into gaming, maybe it serves some purpose. I am not.

If you just blindly download and install the typical download packages available for ATI cards, you may well end up with Catalyst, even though you don't want it or need it.

Updated, hopefully that'll help
Well, occasionally it crashes on the start-up and when I hop onto any game, my pc crashes almost instantly. I think it helps keep my graphics card's temperature under control.

This started happening 2 days ago. It was random but it crashed and ever since that it's been really slow. I was playing Sims 3 I think.. There were no updates to my knowledge.

Windows 7 7600 RTM never crashed on me.
But onces I got the actual windows 7 it started crashing more. The drivers helped a bit but everyday it usually crashes once.

Why would you need Adobe CS 4 in startup?? Or Google Update? Or Daemon tools. Or etcetera?

That's what I thought, so I turned them off.

What is left with a checkmark?

Do you know that you have the most recent version of the Catalyst package?


http://tinyurl.com/yme9su

Yeah, I downloaded it not too long ago. I doubt there's a new one. I'll check anyways. Everything but Daemon, Google, and Adobe are checked.

I'd keep unchecking stuff. Windows is going to start even if you uncheck everything.

That is the test to see if your slow boots are related to these apps.

I have exactly 2 items checked: my backup program and my antivirus.

Well, now my PC doesn't even turn on. It's not my motherboard or anything. Because I hooked up this spare harrdrive that has Windows 7 beta 7100 build just to see if it was my actual PC and it wasn't it. So it's the harddrive itself. I'm going to have to reformat and reinstall 7 I guess.
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I fixed it.. Somehow..
I ended up just replugging my hard drive in.. It's pretty weird but my boot up time is back to normal. Maybe it somehow became loose and I didn't realize it. Anyways, thank you everyone for your help