I have a 100-day-old Toshiba Portege R500 that works well except for one thing - the startup time. It takes more than 11 minutes to show the desktop (after I type in the logon password) each time I boot up the system. After hours of trouble shooting, I found out if I disabled the Windows service "extensible authentication protocol", then the startup time became normal. However, of course then I lost my wireless thus my internet. What should I do? TIA

I'd suggest taking a look at the properties of your network connections, the properties of your network devices, and the number of network devices that are shown in Device Manager. I'd suspect that one of these things is causing your network to initialize slowly. This also assumes that your connection (and it's hardware) are Vista compatible (this includes your router, modem, and your ISP's hardware).

Often it's the stuff that translates IPv6 so it can be used over IPv4 networks that will cause this (although it can be as simple as the DHCP Broadcast flag not being compatible with your hardware).

I'm going to move this over to the Networking forum for some more in-depth assistance. Good luck!

You are brilliant! After I disabled the Wireless device (Intel Wireless WiFi Link 4965AGN), and using only wired Ethernet connection, the problem went away. Awesome! Now if I can figure out which part of the wireless system goes wrong. I have a Netopia SDSL router and a Trendnet TEW-633GR as an add-on wireless router.