On startup the performance monitor shows that excel is generating a lot of disk i/oWy is it that excel is doing that. I do not start excel on startup.

There is a startup file for office generally, its designed to accelerate load times. It should not generate a lot of I/O unless you have a lot of files stored on a server. In the server case the startup may take a bit to get all the connections operational.I use a Linux server and have lots of office files on it, and its not slow for me as my LAN is super fast.I am a professional developer and I am registered with Microsoft Connect. I am also a vegan. Economics and chess are two of my many interests.

DutchCappie,I'd suggest starting a command line (Win Key + R then cmd) and typing: wmicstartupgetcaption,commandwhich will return a list of everything that stats up with Windows. As an example, here is my output: C:\Users\Ricardo>wmicstartupgetcaption,command CaptionCommand MicrosoftOfficeGrooveMicrosoftOfficeGroove.lnk Sidebar%ProgramFiles%\WindowsSidebar\Sidebar.exe/autoRun MoeMonitor.exe"C:\Users\Ricardo\AppData\Local\Microsoft\LiveMesh\Bin\Servicing\0.9.3424.14\MoeMonitor.exe" FveNotify%WINDIR%\system32\fveNotify.exe SysTrayApp%ProgramFiles%\IDT\WDM\sttray64.exe If you post that back here we can diagnose further.Cheers,Justin