Good afternoon,

I would be very grateful if someone could tell me what stupidity I have committed!

I have spent a substantial chunk of the weekend, yesterday and this morning 'tidying' up my desktop. I had a lot of programmes that could do the same job so I decided to dlete the others, but NOT the file I downloaded and installed them from. If I need to install them in the future I have the file ready to go! So I thought I had been quite good and - if I am honest - a bit clever, but in a way it now seems to have blown up in my face!

I had to re-boot the computer and I noticed that there was the same problem as I had on boot up this morning. I have Windows 7 Home Premium 64Bit and everything goes quite well until the four colours appear, then the icons 'twitch' [ I think that's the best explanation ], they go white and a second later revert to what they should be. I use avast and have a clock, temperature and sky news from 'ms gadgets' on my desktop, but these are now taking almost 2 minutes to appear, whereas they used to appear after about 15 - 20 seconds. and until they appear the computer is almost useless. I ran 'msconfig' and only have 4 programmes at start up, and these have been the same for at least a couple of weeks, so why the slow start up completely baffles me and I would be very grateful if anyone has an idea of what I have done wrong, AND what I need to do to get the computer ready to go in the time it used to take.

Many thanks in anticipation.