First app slow after logon

It sounds like windows is having an increasingly difficult time restoring network connections at logon. This can be caused by invalid entries in your Wins database, (the sorce of lmhosts files)

I would temporarily enable quick logon, which causeswindows to not restore network connections automatically, only when they are accessed.
Doing this, you can then monitor which network connection(s) are causing the slowdown.

You can enable quick logon by setting properties of "client for microsoft networks"

open network properties, select client for microsoft networks, select the properties for this. At the bottom, you may then select
"quick logon".

Afterwards, you may then make adjustments on your Wins server table, regarding the network resource entry which is causing excessive browsing traffic on your network.

Hope this helps.

BOOT LOG ANALYZER. If your computer is booting slowly, this little
freeware utility at http://www.vision4.dial.pipex.com/ may identify
the source of the delay. The Boot Log Analyzer reports the delay with
loading each DLL (Dynamic Link Library) and identifies problems some
of the DLL may be having with properly loading. The BLA won't fix your
problems, but you might be better informed so you can either ditch
the offending software or go looking for a fix.

Could be a bunch of programs in the startup processes. Check the following for (unnecessary) programs:

WIN.INI - look for "load=" and "run=" entries. This section load 16 bit (read: slow) programs

REGEDIT - go to
-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
-SOFTWARE
-MICROSOFT
-WINDOWS
-CURRENTVERSION

From here, check
-RUN
-RUNSERVICES

You'd be amazed how many programs install themselves in here!

Also check HKEY_CURRENT_USER/SOFTWARE/MICROSOFT/WINDOWS/CURENTVERSION for even more goodies.

Verify there is at least 100 MB free disk space on the system, and if a program like memturbo is running, that can cause a delay if set to defrag memory on boot as well.