you could do several things, first if you have powertoys for windows xp, check to see if it is set to automatically log on the user, if it is uncheck that. If you do not have this, you could assign a password to your account, therefore it would pause waiting for you to enter that password, and in the mean time it would continue to load the services in the background. Also in the control pannel under user accounts, you can change the way users log on to the system. hope this helps