My computer is experiencing a weird problem. When booting up, it just sits at the desktop background for about a minute before loading any of the desktop items. Before, icons and bars would load immediatly, but now it just sits at my wallpaper. I've done virus scans and havent found anything, so does anything have any idea what this problem is?

http://www.filehippo.com/download_ccleaner/

Then a disk defrag

could be corrupted system files or you just have something ugly running at startup.

Do a http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310353 and see if it still happens

So you have nothing but a wallpaper?
I can't tell you how to fix it for good, but you can try opening task manager (ctrl+shift+esc) click file --> new task and then type "explorer.exe". That should bring everything up for the time being.

Other than that you might try booting in safe mode and see if it may be a bad driver or something.

I did both of those, but it still hangs at the desktop wallpaper.



I'll try that after my current scan with Ad-aware is finished



How can you tell if its a bad driver? I havent updated my drivers or anything recently. The only thing updated was a Windows update a few days ago really.

In safe mode it only loads necessary things which I suppose doesn't include most drivers. I can't tell you how to tell which one would be causing it though because I'm not a big techie but it could help narrow down what the problem might be.
Have you tried a system restore?