Laptop taking ~10 minutes to load a user profile

When I turn on my laptop it will load fine until the user profile screen. If I click my profile first (it's password protected) then it just hangs there and loads nothing (not even the password prompt box). If I load a user profile without a password first it will load, but that takes about 10 minutes to load, when it is loaded I can log out of that profile and log into mine.
It started about a month ago. The only thing I installed then was a flash player update, but I uninstalled that...
I was told by a friend that "the fix to that is reformatting the laptop, as the Registry and OS files are badly damaged."

Is that true and if so could it be fixed without needing to reformat the laptop?

Uninstalling a Flash update shouldn't corrupt your computer to that degree.

You may have malware on your computer.

Try a full scan with Malwarebytes.

Failing that, your user profile may be corrupted so you could try creating a new one.

If you still have a restore point available at a time before you installed Flash, you could try a system restore to that point.

I was meaning that was the only thing I installed around that time. I have scanned my laptop a few times since then and nothing shows up. I have did a boot scan as well and found nothing.

Did you try a new user profile?

I was also going to suggest a repair install, but Petey has already mentioned it and posted the link for you.

I am doing the sfc scan now and will report back on that. I did create a new profile and now it seems to only take a minute or two for the user profile (any of them) to load...why has the time decreased so much?

The scan has finished and it says
"Windows Resource Protection did not find any integrity violations."

Have alot of applications at startup?Could be that there's to many startup items. Type msconfig in the search bar in the windows start button window and open it up.Then check in the tab called startup and see what's there and list what's in it,could be some apps you don't necessarily need to run at start up that could be causing slow downs.Once you decided what you don't need you can take of the check next to the application that you don't need starting at system boot.

I have 9 applications starting:
Winstron Hotkey APP
Intel(R) Common User Interface
Intel(R) Common User Interface
avast! Antivirus
Microsoft Security Client
Microsoft Windows Operating System
Gadwin PrintScreen
Skype
DAEMON Tools Pro