Whenever I boot up my Windows XP SP 2 machine it hangs on the “Applying Computer Settings” screen for about 5 minutes. I found out that this might be due to the “Network Location Awareness (NLA)” service. After disabling this service in the Computer Management console everything went back to normal.
Instructions: Right click on “My Computer” and select “Manage”. Open up the “Services and Applications” node then the “Services” node. Find “Network Location Awareness (NLA)” in the list and right click and select properties. Change the startup type to “Disabled” and then press ok. Reboot your computer and see if this helped.