Hi Nick, maybe try doing a reset of IE settings, under the system Control Panel > Internet Options > Advanced tab, as shown in this blog post:
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2006/06/12/628499.aspx

Maybe that will fix up something that's gotten mangled in your system registry for the Internet Explorer infrastructure.

> is there any way to log the startup or find out
> whats going on during the startup?

Well, there is a general purpose Windows system performance analyzer thing:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/performance/cc825801.aspx
but it's not exactly easy to use.

There is also another utility that can trigger a crash dump to be generated from a running program and if you make one of those near the middle of the long startup then you could send that to me and I would be able to see what was going on at that particular instant in time. Let me know if doing the IE reset above does not help and we can give this a try.


- Michael