Recently Windows 7 has been booting very slow. This actually starts after the appearance of the Welcome screen, not during the appearance of the Windows logo.Previously the Welcome screen was shown for only a few seconds and then the desktop appeared directly.But now the Welcome screen appears for 20-25 seconds,then the screen goes black for another 30-40 seconds and finally the desktop appears.I installed BOOT RACER to measure the boot time and the average time is near about 3minutes.I tried to find out a solution by googling all day and night but could not find anything except one in MICROSOFT ANSWERS [http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-performance/windows-7-slow-boot/ba062956-286f-4a81-9b0e-cc29276babe0]. I went through the posts but could not find out the exact solution,so I decided to post in this forum. A brief history: What actually happened is that I downloaded Windows8 skin pack for Windows7 and tried to install it.After the installation finished,I was asked to reboot my computer. After rebooting, I found that neither my computer was starting up nor I could enter the advanced boot option (by pressing F8 when the manufacturer's logo appeared). So the only option left with me was to do a start up repair using the system repair disc (that I created earlier).It helped me and finally I could see my computer booting to desktop. From that day on-wards, I started facing this slow boot problem. I thought that everything will be normal after several boots but it proved me wrong. I suspected that my system might have been affected by viruses or malwares. So I ran a thorough scan on my system using MALWARE BYTES ANTIMALWARE, SUPER ANTISPYWARE, tdsskiller,Avast!. Nothing was detected except some ad-ware tracking cookies by SUPER ANTISPYWARE and some key-gens(which I manually downloaded) by MALWARE BYTES ANTIMALWARE. Moreover I carried a thorough cleanup process using CCLEANER, Advanced System Care, Wise Registry Cleaner, Wise Disk Cleaner (including disk defrags,registry defrags,disk clean up,check disk,etc.) but...none of them helped me to reduce my system's boot time. I went through the post in MICROSOFT ANSWERS and here are the answers of the question that were asked by "Andre.Ziegler" to "thunderclap82" - 1>I don't have a solid color wallpaper but still I tried to run this [http://support.microsoft.com/hotfix/KBHotfix.aspx?kbnum=977346&kbln=en-us] hotfix. After performing the steps the only reply that I got was- "the update is not applicable to your computer". It didn't fix my issue.So I decided to make a boot trace. 2>When I traced boot using " xbootmgr -trace boot -traceFlags BASE+CSWITCH+DRIVERS+POWER -resultPath C:\TEMP " command, my computer showed a startup problem and as a result I had to restore my system to get everything back on track. 3>Then I tried to trace the boot using " xbootmgr -trace boot -traceFlags BASE+CSWITCH+POWER -resultPath C:\TEMP " command and it worked showing the following error- Gave up waiting for Win7RTM physical prefetcher after 300 seconds. Could not wait for prefetcher. Could't find kernel logger in active logger list. Couldn't find user-mode logger in active logger list. Fortunately the system could stop the trace!! I have compressed the boot_BASE+CSWITCH+DRIVERS+POWER_1.etl as .RAR and have uploaded it to my Skydrive.The link is https://skydrive.live.com/redir?resid=C816A9980F6DD75!148 It takes nearly 3 minutes for my computer to boot to desktop and you know its really frustrating. Its freaking me out. I don't have any idea how to deal with this problem. Please help me out. I don't want to re-install windows. I have provided my System Information in SkyDrive too and the link is https://skydrive.live.com/redir?resid=C816A9980F6DD75!150 Thanking you in anticipation, Regards, Purnendu