PC Boot Time now 15+ minutes, no indication of problems..

Wow, I believe the whole root of the problem has been discovered, thanks to one of the points on that checklist. I looked at the Event Viewer under the Admin Tools section and found over 2000 alerts, all occurring within the recent time frame of increased boot time.

Here is a sample of some of the most recurring:

= The following boot-start or system-start driver(s) failed to load:
cdrom

= Event filter with query "SELECT * FROM __InstanceModificationEvent WITHIN 60 WHERE TargetInstance ISA "Win32_Processor" AND TargetInstance.LoadPercentage > 99" could not be reactivated in namespace "//./root/CIMV2" because of error 0x80041003. Events cannot be delivered through this filter until the problem is corrected.

=The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Ide\IdePort1.

Explanations as to what is happening, much appreciated.

I've saved the events as a list from within Event Viewer so everything can be seen clearly. There are a few different events, but the ones listed in my last post are the ones seeming to recur most often.

(file attached)

After going over the event lists in Google, I've found the problem: the controller on the motherboard where the DVD drive was initially plugged seemed to no longer work properly. Moving the SATA cable to another port did the trick and the desktop now boots back to normal times of 10-12 seconds.

Thank you greg, and everyone else, for pointing out the troubleshooting steps (it was what lead me to the Event Viewer part of Win7). With that, I can have a much better idea of what's happening in the future, helping to be better prepared as well.


:)

Good work, aeris!
You learned this by googling the error text from the two related errors in Post #21?

It was one of those errors that lead me to another forum post where someone suggested that the the controller where the SATA cable is plugged into may have gone bad (on the motherboard). Based on some earlier issues I had (some months ago I had 2 DVD drives installed, but the second one continuously caused boot problems so I had to disconnect it - which resolved problems for the time), I figured the problem was the same here. It looks like (and Event Viewer is proving me correct on this - no further errors since the change) that the SATA controller spots 3 and 4 are no good, as they were where the DVD drives were plugged in last. I've taken the now singular DVD drive and plugged it into spot 5 and it's worked fine without any glitches.

I wish I could bring up the exact website I used to find that solution, but I can't seem to find it atm. If I do, I will be sure to post its link here.