This is begining to bother me a bit im currently running windows xp pro on a fairly decent system
Athlon 2.0ghz "1.66ghz clocked" XP Cpu
1.5gig DDR pc3200 ram

*im thinking video/sound/hd/net wont makea difference for this problem*

Well anyways my pc only takes about 20 seconds from Bios to winxp logon screen , now when i have explorer set as my shell once i login and its loading my personal settings it only takes 5 seconds to reach my desktop but when im using litestep it takes well over 30 seconds to load up to my desktop =/ Im currently running LiteStep 0.24.7 OST

I spoke to someone earlier and used a nice tweak site as refference and turned off alot of unnessecary services winxp start up and startup items and there was little/no change @ all.

Any help/info on why its takeing so long would be greatly appreciated.

use classic logon

or press Ctrl+Alt+Del when you logged in
Your session was successfully started, it is just a logon screen in front of the desktop...

There should be a number of threads about this. Basically, the welcome screen seems to be waiting for some signal that the shell is started. Of course this is undocumented. It happens with all alternative shells. The only known workarounds are mentioned above.

But it has been probably a year or so allready that this 'problem' is know. Are you sure there hasn't yet been someone who solved it?
Maybe even LiteStep itself?

well, we have some ideas about it now, but no one has really come forward to try to code a solution... its going to require reverse engineering some messages that winlogon is sending to the current shell which explorer handles but litestep and all other alternate shells dont (since we dont know what they do) if im not mistaken. this is the closest anyone has come so far as far as i know.

I see, well I hope they solve it some time soon, so I can finally start using LiteStep on this PC as well :)