now i have win 2k professional edition with 256 mb ram and yes i have spyware and anti-virus on my comp....i have tried both i.e adaware lavasoft and norton anti-virus.....

the comps not slow during logging on but when the desktop appears and all those applications at startup r running then it becomes damn slow....so slow u mite think its hung r sth....

the last thing i probably did b4 comp became slow weeks ago was downloading loads of things....but then i have removed most of these once the comp did get slow and have tried cleanup tools like disk cleanup and defragmentor as afore mentioned