Suddenly crawling at boot time -- second instance

Hi,

I bought my Acer almost 12 months ago. I'm running XP.

For the first couple of months it was fine, but quite suddenly it began overnight to crawl through the boot process.When it came to playing the Windows introductory theme through the speakers the sound was distorted: it played slowly. When the system eventually booted everything was very slow to use. I assumed that I must have installed something that had caused a problem and tried uninstalling things, but nothing helped. It became such a pain that I stopped using the Acer.

Less than a week ago it occurred to me to try to restore the Acer to its original condition via Acer eRecovery. All went fine, and it became fast and sleek again. Last night I left it on Standby, but this morning when I started it up it had resumed the crawling into boot business, along with the fractured playing of the start theme.

I looked in System Restore and found that this morning a Restore Point was created after something was installed via Software Distribution Service 3. I Googled that and found that other people have had boot problems as a result of using Windows Automatic Update, but I wasn't able to find a solution.

I've just used System Restore to return to yesterday morning's system, but it didn't help. When the PC rebooted it was slow and playback of the sound file was distorted again.

Can anyone please help me with this? I have auto updates for Windows on my desktop but this problem hasn't happened there. It may not be an auto updates problem, of course, but to me (a non-techy) it's looking that way. Please help if you can, because my Acer is virtually unusable like this.

 

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