windows - Win XP very slow booting up - multiple volume files?

Windows XP Home Premium with SP3
500MB RAM
2.9 GHz Processor
50GB free space on HD

My sister's PC takes ages to boot up so she asked me to look at it...

Upon inspection within task manager it appears that about 40 instances of the volume control seem to be open in the task manager applications tab? These subsequently correspond to about 40 sndvol32.exe processes in the processes tab.

So this would seem to be why her computer takes ages to start but why these volume files are appearing so much i do not know?

Any ideas/thoughts appreciated?

Answer

get Autoruns and clean up the startup routine then.

also have a look at Blackviper's service tweak guide.