I am not sure if this problem is a hardware one or a software problem or what part of the computer is wrong. Anyways to start off, my xp takes forever to boot. It gets stuck with a black screen for about 4 -5 minutes then the windows xp load screen comes on. Periodically my motherboard wont detect any of my ide primary or secondary drives. So i dont know if its a hard drive problem, an overheating problem, or a motherboard issue.

my mother board is an nforce4 i forget the numbers, hd western digital 320 and 160 processor amd 3200+ 1gb of ram.A BIT more INFO Would be nice , post all the Specs of your mother board and HDDs

Also , did this just HAPPEN? was it working fine before?

Dose XP boot Every time? or will it sometimes not show up at all and SAY no Boot Disk.

Also if its Booting Very slow , what do you do to stop Virus's Adware and Spyware. the slow boot could just be too much crap. or it could be a Bad HDDlets us know the protection your computer has? AV antispywareHere is an interesting read for you:

http://support.microsoft.com/?scid=kb;en-us;314503