veeery slow to boot up

[Ofina]

This morning my desktop seemingly wouldn't finish booting up. I went into safe mode and everything was fine. Ran sfc /scannow from command prompt opened as admin. No good. Meaning it didn't help.
Decided to let it go longer and see what happened. Got distracted by various things. About 2.5 hours later it was open and functional, though slow. While it was loading up I got google desktop couldn't open and Cannot Create System Shell Notification Icon.
After the 2.5 hours I ran an antivirus (AVG free edition) and it didn't get anything (oh, I had run that from safe mode too and it came up with a couple of things).
I set it to run chkdsk /f /r when it was next shut down. It's doing this now.

Anyone have any ideas? I'm pretty tech savvy, but when it comes to basic system things like this I have no idea.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that after this chkdsk and reboot it will be back to normal, but I doubt it.

 

[goombawaho]

I'd run the manufacturer's hard drive test for your brand of hard drive to see if the hard drive is failing, although you said Safe Mode performed normally. I guess I'd still run the test.

http://www.tacktech.com/display.cfm?ttid=287

After that (hard drive shows good) if you have the patience to let the machine boot to regular mode, run TDSSKiller from regular mode an see what it shows. The scan only takes a couple minutes.

Then, I'd run CCleaner from Safe Mode to clean things up. Then remove the AVG anti-virus, reboot and run Combofix from Safe Mode and see what it cleans up.

If no joy then, does the computer have a SATA hard drive or an IDE? If IDE it could be running in PIO mode. Fix here:

http://winhlp.com/node/10

(VBS file - I've used it before)