Another thing to but I hate suggesting this to people because things can go really wrong when doing it but sometimes defragging the drive is they way to go as well.
If you defrag you must backup all the important stuff first. There is a very small chance your disk will become unrecoverable.
I never used to believe that until it happened to me.
And before doing that you could try using Bootvis if you're using winXP.
It speeds up the booting process by moving all the boot files into the areas of the harddrive that are accessed first.
It could just be thats the problem and ICQ has nothing to do with it.
Ok this is interesting. I went to look for a link for bootvis for you and I came up with this from MS
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system...t/BootVis.mspx
It says there that bootvis doesn't actually speed your bootup despite lots of reports that it does.
Well ok I tried.
the other thing you can do and this really made my comp lighting fast is to disable services that you don't need.
This needs to be doen with caution as well because you might find yourself without your net connection if you disable the wrong services.
This guy here has a pretty good site with tutorials on it though.
http://www.blackviper.com/
Look at the menu on the left and go to "features"
To give you an idea my comp was booting up to 150MB before and I was able to skim it right down to 85MB boot.
The difference was very noticable and lightning fast.
Threaded Mode