Hangups before and after login

[kahlil88]

I offered to optimize someone's Vista laptop the other day, and I noticed that while it runs fairly smooth in general, it hangs for several seconds at a black screen with the mouse cursor before and after the login prompt. After disabling drive indexing, system restore and several unnecessary startup items, it doesn't hang quite as long, but based on my experience with other Vista systems, I should think there is a way to completely eliminate the hangups.