If you only have one or two IDE drives in your computer, try disabling the unused IDE ports on each of your channels. To do this, you'll need to go into Device Manager, click the plus sign next to "IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers", then right click on one of your IDE channels and select Properties. Go to the Advanced Settings tab at the top, where you'll be shown the device type and transfer mode of each IDE port. Where the ports aren't being used and the transfer mode shows "Not Applicable", you can change the device type to "None". This should prevent Windows XP probing for drives on bootup and attempting to configure transfer modes for those that don't exist, and it cuts a considerable amount of time off my bootup Cheers, Dan.