Adobe Premiere taking forever to load up

[liquidsub]

My computer is powerful enough to load Premiere with NO problems. Win. XP Pro, 2 gigs of ram, AMD Athlon 64.
And it used to open up fast. But now it just takes forever..
I one time left it on, and went to sleep for 2-3 hours and it finally opened. I don't want to wait hours for a lousy program to open up.
Did this ever happen to you?

Other questions that don't belong here but are optional to answer, I have a Sony TRV-900, and suddenly my tape can't rewind, foward, or playback the video. And when I stop and rewind it makes a loud whirring sound. There's no time code displaying on the camera either. It was working before. What happened?
And as for playback I see strange artifacts flying all over the screen, it's very annoying. Luckily it goes away when you compress the video but what if I want to make it go straight to DVD after editing? If I compress it to a DVD file (which is nearly uncompressed, or just very high quality) it keeps the artifacts.
And last, my cntrl+z undo shortcut isn't working in photoshop cs. It's set up but it won't work. Neither does cntrl x. It's annoying going to the edit menu and clicking "undo" or "cut" all the time.
-Thanks.

[edDV]

My computer is powerful enough to load Premiere with NO problems. Win. XP Pro, 2 gigs of ram, AMD Athlon 64.
And it used to open up fast. But now it just takes forever..
I one time left it on, and went to sleep for 2-3 hours and it finally opened. I don't want to wait hours for a lousy program to open up.
Did this ever happen to you?
...

The problem is most likely a corrupted driver or registry error. I had it happen once and could only solve it with an uninstall and reinstall.

[liquidsub]

Reinstalling is not working. It's probably a registry thing or driver? How do I fix that?

[Buzzword]

Gotta ask this basic question because I had a similar problem once....have you tried defragging the drive and clearing out old files?

[edDV]

Reinstalling is not working. It's probably a registry thing or driver? How do I fix that?

I'd go ask in the premiere specific forums like:

http://www.dmnforums.com/cgi-bin/displaywwugindex.fcgi?forum=adobe_premiere
http://www.tek-tips.com/threadminder.cfm?pid=230

[liquidsub]

I recently reformatted my hard drive, there's no way I need to defrag it now.

EDIT: Oh, due to system restore, I found out that Windows Service Pack 2 is messing it up. No wonder I was told not to download it. I can't remove it via remove'add hardware at the control panel cause they said its not installed which is really weird. So I download service pack 1 and they said it won't update cause I have service pack 2.
Sigh.. probably the wrong place to ask about microsoft stuff now.
Unless...

How do I keep certain files with me when I use system restore? I just installed Halflife 2 and would like to bring it with me to my system restore point of feb. 28th.
Unless you'll tell me that if I install it again, they won't tell me my cd key has already been used.