Computer freezes for ~2 minutes after boot

Hmmm I don't know if anyone here can answer this, worth a try.

Every time I turn on my computer it boots fine. However, once it hits the desktop, I can do maybe one action and then the computer freezes for the next 1-2 minutes. After that it works normally.
Pretty much the only thing I can do before it freezes is Ctrl + Alt + Del but the task manager doesn't show anything useful because it freezes too.

Sometimes I can move my mouse, sometimes I can't. If I click my mouse >3 times then my computer makes a number of beeping sounds approximately proportional to the number of mouse clicks I make. My mouse will jerk on the screen each beep. Clicking in quick succession tends to generate beeps much faster than long delays between. Other than that I get no response from my computer.

Typically this long freeze ends with my screen refreshing 1-2 times, if that has anything to do with it.

I'm not exactly sure what's wrong with this. It started a few months ago when my graphics card crashed while playing GW, so I got a new graphics card. But this problem never went away. I ran memtest to check my ram and stuff but everything was fine.

Something similar happened to me recently, so I guess I'll share.

Last Friday my graphics card also died while playing GW and after I replaced it, I wasn't able to use windows explorer. I could still run GW, Firefox, or WinAmp but If I tried to use anything involved with windows like My Computer or the Start button windows would stall out. I could still alt-tab into Firefox or GW though. The only way to get rid was like you to do Crtl-Alt-Delete and log off and then on.

I tried a bunch of things from memtests to disk checks and finally I just caved and reformatted and re-installed windows after backing up anything important.

My only advice is if you haven't already run a dish check as you've alreay passed the memtest. Also have you fully updated your videocard drivers?

It's always wise to install drivers properly and usually use the newest ones unless you're on very old hardware.

Also did you remove your old video drivers? how did you remove them and so on. To me it sounds like a borked and cluttered bootup, how many processes are running on bootup?

Which OS are you running?

Have you switched Video card brands? ie nvidia to ati or vice versa?

Definitely check drivers, but also:
Start it up in safe mode (press f8 while booting, select "safe mode")
See if it still lags up. If it doesnt lag up, it probably means some program is starting with windows...perhaps antivirus or something...that is taking too much of the system resources during startup.

The problem is ram, you are either on an old system that just supports the reqs to play the game or you dont have enough ram in your system to keep up with the amount of graphic display the game is puting out. You system is trying to catch up with the graphics thus creating the lag. This happens to people a lot in the major towns where theres a lot of movement and activity. Check if you have any background programs running like a virus scan or firewall, even IM programs can cause problems. anything thats eating away at your active memory will lag your system. The reqs are 250 ram and 500 to run it smoothly but I've noticed it runs best with at least 1 gig of ram and a decent vid card with updated drivers.

Yea, try safe mode if the driver thing doesn't work out. That's how I knew It was a software problem for me because the explorer worked fine in Safe Mode.

to the OP

complete system specs would be greatly beneficial in diagnosing the problem:

go to "run" and type in -dxdiag then upload the info somewhere so we can see it.

Hmmm... ok...

I sent in a support ticket to NCSoft earlier about some other issue with guild wars and they told me to try uninstalling ThreatFire... and magically it solved this problem (and that one too)... now wtf...

I had threatfire installed before this problem began; why is tf causing problems now??...

I've never even heard of ThreatFire. 95%+ of the time all these free antivirus/spyware/firewalls/registry cleaners really end up borking your system or installing their own malware/spyware and slow down systems. Treat anything free in these category with caution.