Home Basic extended boot time

[alell]

Dell Inspiron 531, 3GB ram, 136GB free on internal HD, well over a TB external.

Boot time has been getting longer and longer. This morning more than 45 minutes, but runs fine afterwards. One of the two or three black-and-white screens that pops up during the process has four choices for "Operating System," and will work with only one of them. They all say "Windows Vista Home Basic," nothing more, with no way to distinguish between them. Other than problems with speech recognition, which I've posted here previously, I haven't run into any more anomalies.
Someone has suggested Neosmart's repair disc. Is this a good and trustworthy solution? Will I have to reinstall my many programs after using it? Is there another solution?
Thanks, folks.

[Roderunner]

Hi alell, read this to see if it can help.

Attachment 28176

[JDB1984]

Roderunnner provides a very useful resource but I personally would suggest you boot the machine into Dell's Diagnostic partition and run a hard disk check to reassure yourself that hardware fault is not the issue.

What I have found in the past in some cases is that errors within the hard disk will propagate at the start of the disk and cause extremely sluggish performance and once the system is booted it is essentially accessing a different area of the disk to load software etc and this is why the issue "goes away" once the system is fully booted.