Thanks for the reply. Nothing unusual in Event Viewer, the only things that come up are a couple of warning notes on a display driver (Nvidia) and CTxfispi.exe, a Creative driver. I've seen such things in previous installations but they never seemed to cause any apparent problems. Furthermore, this slow log on issue was already there before I installed the Nvidia and Creative drivers. And before I installed my AV (Eset Nod32) as well.

I'm pretty sure its got something to do with user accounts. I followed this solution (which is for Vista) and it solved the problem. Log on was near instantaneous afterwards. BUT the problem reappeared after a couple of hours.

Did your problem re appear after restoring your settings? If so you may have to manually restore the profile checking after every step to find the culprit.You have a service or process running on your profile that is causing this hold up and it needs to be tracked down and the only method my experience level has to offer is to manually check one at a time until you find the offender. It may help to compare what services, processes,and startup items are running on good profiles versus the bad one also check what apps are available to both users it should be one that is only in the problem profile.

Heh heh, I solved the problem just before reading your post. This is a weird one.

With msconfig, I disabled all the services and problem was gone. So I knew it was service related. I narrowed it down to the Desktop Window Manager (which is responsible for taskbar thumbnail previews and other eye candy). Another clue was when I chose another theme from the personalization menu, problem also gone. What caused the problem it seems was the desktop background. When I chose a solid color as a background, for some odd reason it would delay logon and startup by over 30 seconds. When I chose a Windows wallpaper, logon was instantaneous. Since I prefer a solid black background, I just made a black jpg file as wallpaper and now everything is working normally.