need some (urgent) help

ok, my system just started acting weird.
i have xp, havent formatted in 9 months, ran like i just installed it, took really good care of it

now i tried booting, and it took about 5-6 minutes (normally takes ~40 seconds)

so i tried a whole bunch of things, ended up formatting.

after formatting, it STILL did this. so then i thought maybe its a hardware problem. took out everything, booted with barebones, it worked fine. added in sound card, worked fine. cdrom drive..fine..then i added in my 2nd drive (i have 2 drives, 1 reg cdrom, another cdrw). this drive is on secondary master. i put it in, works fine. i boot up, the system is slow again. then i take it out, works fine. put it in, works fine..next reboot its slow.

so i took out the drive. and it works fine. until now. its bootign up slow again. i put my old dvd drive in, and that worked fine. now i disconnected it, still boots up slow. now i think maybe its my 2nd hard drive. so i took that out, still boots slow.

my system specs:

athlon xp 1700+
shuttle kt266a mobo
256mb kingston ram
aopen 56x cd rom
lite-on 24x10x40 cdrw
maxtor 60gb
wd 10gb
visiontek gf4 ti4400 (o/c)
dlink 10/100nic
sb audigy


so what do you think the problem is? its very very frustrating, its almost 230 am and ive been tryign to work it out all day. *sigh*
tomorrow ill run a diagnostic on my maxtor 60gb, maybe theres something wrong with the drive. i built the comp, ive had it for well over a year now, i dont understand what it is. im pretty sure its hardware, because even aftera full format + reinstall of windows, it did it.
perhaps theres something wrong with my mobo's IDE channels?


gonna post this over at anandtech too. thanks guys.

I've got XP home.I had installed Morpheus and when I played a video file,the system halted and went into hibernation.The OS remained slow for a day or two,but its kinda working fine right now.Needless to say,I've sweared to never install any P2P software again!

it wasnt anything like that. i ve fixed it (temporarily it hink)

i took out everything again and booted lots of times adding another peice of hardware in, it works alright now.

Did you really figure out what's the root of the problem? I shouldn't be the P2P s/w problem huh?