Mine is just around 20-30 sec (from powering up computer to desktop showing and ready to use) i dont have much programs running at startup including antivirus..

why your's take too long to boot up?

kekeke..you might be right about that as some of those softwares you mentioned are indeed bloated and heavy which could slow down your boot time like zonealarm and vmware..

i dont have these 2 programs in my windows actualy. i just use xp's built in firewall but note that it's will not filter out your outbound traffic though (your pc to network/internet) since it's been designed to only block/allow inbound/incoming traffic (network/internet to your pc) blehh..i dont really care.

and about virtual machine, my choice is virtualbox since it doesnt install so many services that have to be always running in the background. Tried vmware before but didnt like it much because of dozens of services it installed but this program undeniabley one of the great vm machine programs out there *thumbs up*

(when it comes to free vm machine, virtualbox is always the winner) *wink*