Thank you again for your reply. I have Home Premium and I unistalled the Norton trial immediately. I am using McAfee provided by Comcast instead. Thank you for the link. I went to the page and don't see anything wierd in the services, but honestly I don't think I know what I'm looking for. I did check my problems and reports area and it tells me:
Service CyberLink Background Capture Service (CBCS) hung on starting. I get this error at every boot.
Product
CLCapSvc
Problem
Service Hang Report
Hello, please excuse my ignorance but I am new here and just came across this post; how exactly do you access the "problems and reports" area of Windows? How do you read/interpret it? I suspect that one or more of my services/programs/drivers are getting hung at startup which is causing a delay and the black screen that just sits there for about a minute.
Thanks to all who reply.