1min 40sec -> 5mins?!
That's very strange. Currently at home I have 2 systems running on XP Service Pack 2, and everything appears to actually run faster for me.
God knows how poorly setup you system is to take almost 2minutes to boot up.
I've actually sat down and timed my boot-up times,
Boot from cold, it'll takes approx. 15seconds to get to windows log-in screen (512mb takes a while for the ram check which i can't skip on this system)
When I click the login it'll open Windows itself and will be ready to use within 3-4seconds.
It won't stop loading software for about a minute, but unless the system has just crashed (normally Sound Card/AGP Bridge IRQ error) i can use my system without worrying what's loading in the background.
It isn't a state of the art system either:
Celeron 1GHz 200MHz FSB / PC133 8ns 512MB SdRam / Geforce FX 5200 64MB AGP / Creative SB16 IDE ISA / Realtek 8029 NIC / SiS 900 NIC / USB 2.0 Teracyon 4 Ports / Seagate 20GB DMA33 (Pri Master) Hitachi 160GB DMA133 (Pri Slave) Philips CDR1600+ (Sec Slave) (all are on C40 PIO4 Cables)
So, it is hardly the most amazingly fast system for XP to be running on... yet still gets some more than reasonable running times.
About all I've done with this system which isn't done as default, is to disable the Messenger Service.
Those popups drive me bloody mad, but that's all the optimisation i've done.