Desktop does not appear for at least 5 minutes

Well, I don't even know where to start but here I go.
Last Wednesday my system started taking forever to load
the desktop. Basically, after selecting cancel on the
logon popup screen, my system hesitates for about 5
minutes then loads the desktop. During this hang up I
press ctrl+alt+del and see only three items that have
loaded which are Explorer, Avgserv9 and hidserv. Then
when the desktop load I review the list again and two more
items appear acrotray and avgcc32. I have tried to run Ad-
aware, spybot and AVG to ensure that I do not have any
unexpected items on my system. Also, while I was in
internet explorer I received a message that states "This
program has performed an illegal operation and will be
shut down" and then my desktop disappeared again. I tried
to repair Internet Explorer through the system.ini file
and ran a Repair through the add/remove programs menu.
This did not help. Any suggestions as to what this could
be? Oh and the day before this started happening I loaded
Ulead software for my new pencam, I tried unistalling the
software, as well as, a system restore hoping this would
fix the problem and this did not work.

Thank you in advance for your help.