Weird bootup problem after fighting with ATI AIW9000 driver (upgrade)

Dear Collective,

I have a P41875 Dragon II and ATI Radion 9000 AIW running WinXP Pro. Worked
fine since original assembly and then I decided to do something real stupid
and looked to see if there were any updates to the ATI 9000 AIW device
drivers. I found some, downloaded them, and of course, half my applications
stopped functioning.

I then uninstalled ALL Radion applications and device drivers and let Win-XP
do a plug and pray and reinstalled the original device drivers and
applications from the original CDROMs. All of my applications (except one)
now run fine again but I am left with this weird artifact....

When the system booted before this adventure, the "Welcome" screen lasted
about 2-3 seconds and then went to the main screen while playing the Windows
Start WAV file. NOW... that Welcome screen runs almost a minute (This is a
2.8 GHz P4 with 1G of RAM, 200Gb SATA HD...should boot QUICK). Once the
main screen comes up, the icons are generic and then bounce around in and
out for another 10-20 seconds or so before things stabilize.

This went from a 30 second bootup to a 90 second bootup. What the hey??

Any suggestions?

Thanks,

Jeff