Freezing during Bootup on XP Home

A friend bought a new Dell with XP Home Edition. It worked great until she set up her DSL connection. It immediately began freezing during bootup. I proudly announced I could help her (bad move).
Inspecting her computer I found all connections good and I can get online just fine. HOWEVER, when it first boots, it gets to the last portion of booting and hangs for about two minutes, at which time nothing works. All Icons are showing, but you can't start any program. You can't do anything during that time. Then, after about two minutes it begins working like nothing happened.
I tried disabling everything except Explorer and systray during bootup using MSCONFIG but nothing changed.
Here's the 'mystery': I disconnected the NIC from the DSL modem and VOILA`, it booted just fine: no delay. So, by temporarily disconneting the NIC from the DSL modem it works just fine. I would suspect the modem except the fact that it works just fine getting online and staying there.
Is there something I'm missing? This modem worked just fine on her old system (Windows 98SE). Can a DSL modem cause this 'hanging' during bootup?

Any help or suggestions would be appreciated.

Dusterpilot

 

Other possibility - the PC is working to find network resources it has been told to load at startup and you are simply seeing the delay while it struggles to do so.

Not likely in her particular case but on a network and with a drive mapped and instructed to "reconnect at logon ", a down system can cause this sort of delay while XP tries real hard to connect to a resource that isn't there.

Without lots of system specifics I can't tell you exactly but look around for network/internet things that try to start at bootup and see if you can get them to wait until asked for. That may move the delay period from startup to when you ask and the cause will be obvious.