If it worked before then your current configuration may be causing the issue. Considering you've gone from an HP prefab to a personally customized configuration I'm not sure I really want to know what the source of the problem is lol =P. Sorry I couldn't be of more help.
My install is not personally customized. It's a clean install after formatting and deleting the partitions. It couldn't get more vanilla than that. If aything, the previous install was an OEM customary disaster.
You mentioned that once your computer was setup it was highly unlikely you would visit the Control Panel again. I assumed you were a power user who tweaked the computer to be exactly what you needed it to be. It takes me about a full month to tweak my computer, download and install all programs, driver this, codec that, etc... Come to think of it though I don't really know anybody who has done this to such a degree 
It takes me one day to have my system exactly how I want it to be. Around 7 or 8 hours of work, which is a hell of a lot. There isn't much tweaking (other than UI stuff) in modern systems quite frankly. Now in late 80s Linux distros, that was something else. You pretty much decided what you wanted you system to look and act like, and in order to get that you had to compile the kernel yourself.
These days Linux, Solaris, etc, are UI driven and very simple. Windows is truly idiot-proof. And Macintosh is even simpler. Sometimes I find it more trying to find all the "hidden" functions in my cell phone than in any computer system.
[quote="eric_foulke"]These days Linux, Solaris, etc, are UI driven and very simple.[/quote]Linux has changed a great deal since the 80's. If I had to go that route though I doubt I would go with Linux. I prefer the raw control of FreeBSD myself.
[quote="eric_foulke"]It takes me one day to have my system exactly how I want it to be. Around 7 or 8 hours of work, which is a hell of a lot.[/quote]I work professionally on my computer so I have a LOT of programs with a crapload of settings. Most of the programs require I get into the settings to get everything working just the way I need them to benefit the most. Dopus is a good example of a program that works right off the bat but when customized can provide a higher level of practical efficiency as well as personal comfort. Setting up programs (100+ installations alone), especially since I need to download every one for a fresh install, can take me two days.
Tweaking Windows itself usually takes me about three to five days. My tweaking is very thorough though. Beyond personal research and preparation of mass registry edit/change files, I always read the latest version of Tweak Guides Tweaking Companion (415pg of pure texty goodness). Research of all the Windows services, what they do, what I can get rid of, what I can't do without, what is dependent on what, etc... (courtesy of Black Vipers Service Configurations) takes up to a day of research. I used to just use his prepared mass service configuration files but after numerous hardware and windows functionality problems I put in the extra time to research each service myself.
Even though I have a rig capable of decimating the FPS of any currently released game on max settings, I am still a performance junkie. A great deal of the time taken with setting up Windows is done to ensure I won't have to reinstall for two years bare minimum. A lot of time goes into research of the latest program combinations to ensure maximum stability, longevity, system health, system security, and maximum compatibility with any form of audio or video based media. Research, which includes reading the Tweaking Companion mentioned above, usually takes me about a week and a half, eight hours or more each day.
I try to only do clean installs when I'm upgrading several pieces of hardware on my machine. With the release of Windows 7 and no plans to upgrade hardware within the next two years I decided to go ahead and make the switch from XP to Win7. Had I been building a new machine more time would have been spent on researching computer hardware, building the machine, spending a few days overclocking (most of that time is waiting for stress tests to finish) select pieces of hardware, BIOS customization (the most boring of all research), and then I begin to install Windows which takes two to three weeks (research included), and finally I end the ridiculously drawn out process by making system images.
With weekly maintenance (4 to 8 hours each time) the system continues to run as fast as the day it first booted up. I've never had an OS die on me. Well not in the last eight years since I started doing this routine; something I started because I lost everything. I've reinstalled five or six times in the last eight years, all six times because I was upgrading existing hardware or building a new machine outright. I think of the process as a small sacrifice for piece of mind 
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And yet I do none of that and have never reinstalled this Vista machine from scratch in years....
Research to gain a few miniscule speed ups ? Waste of time imo.
Oh, don't get me wrong, I don't routinely reinstall. I keep images of a working system on my 2nd physical drive. My master image is an image of an install with all my must-have apps plus whaever UI touches I like. So, in the event of a disaster, I can be up and running in 5 minutes by restoring that image. Sure, I'd have to update some security apps that depend on daily defs, but that'd be about all. This time I had to delete partitions, format, and install from scratch simply because Toshiba had thought that partitioning an SSD drive in three (a 64GB SSD) was a good and novel idea. I've mentioned before that 12GB were allocated for the Recovery Partition + all apps and drivers. So I burned a DVD with all the apps and drivers (just in case I ran into some proprietary snag) and proceeded to delete those partitions, and to install a fresh version of the OS, and since Toshiba (just like most manufacturers) doesn't send "real" install DVDs, I decided to get a version of Pro instead of HP. Just having gpedit.msc (among other things) was worth the upgrade in my opinion. Well, I made a short story long now. Previously I hadn't fresh installed a system since the days when XP was first released.
[quote]Tweaking Windows itself usually takes me about three to five days. My tweaking is very thorough though. Beyond personal research and preparation of mass registry edit/change files, I always read the latest version of Tweak Guides Tweaking Companion (415pg of pure texty goodness). Research of all the Windows services, what they do, what I can get rid of, what I can't do without, what is dependent on what, etc... (courtesy of Black Vipers Service Configurations) takes up to a day of research. I used to just use his prepared mass service configuration files but after numerous hardware and windows functionality problems I put in the extra time to research each service myself.
[/quote]
I don't do that. I consider Blackviper a dagerous ignoramus, and I hold the philosophy that the only good RAM is used RAM, otherwise why would I have 6GB of RAM in my system? Well, to use it. Likewise with this notion of cutting services. Sure, if you don't have a printer, obviously disabling the spool service ia a non brainer, same with telnet. But most services set at manual consume nothing as far as CPU cycles, and it's much better to have them ready to go if needed than crppling your sysem by disabling them.
If you routinely follow Tweak Guides, I suggest you simply have a .reg file ready to go, so that you would write to your registry all the stuff you want in one go and one reboot. I stopped doing all this with the advent of dual cores, and currently, running a Core i7, I see even less of a need to do any of that. Same with overclocking. To me those are things of the past, that only put unnecessary strain on HW to see a higher number on a benchmark, but no noticeable change in real life usage. Just my opinion, of course.
A great deal of what I do is for raw control and preventing certain scenarios from being possible. It has been ten years since I owned my first PC and during the first four I made a lot of mistakes that cost me months and months of work over time. Indeed Windows 7 does not need the kind of pampering that Windows 98SE or Windows XP did prior to the introduction of dual+ core processors and the uniform drop in RAM prices. However, setting services to manual and assuming Windows 7 will load and unload them properly is still a feature Microsoft has yet to realize.
The primary reason I disable so many services is I simply do not need more than half of them. However, of that group over half of those services do not unload once they started but are no longer needed. Tweaking services within Windows 7 is for a very different reason than I did within Windows XP. Another reason I tweak the services is so many of the programs I use just love setting up services that run in the background, consuming plenty of memory, and for absolutely no gain. Good examples of this: Creative XF-i Drivers, Open Office, certain virus/malware prevention/scanner software, VMWare, and plenty of third party applications.
I do enjoy benchmarks though as well as SLI Gaming. Are they necessary? Not at all. Are they one of my favorite aspects of building a custom computer? Hell yes =P. While I hate the clean install process I do enjoy the research in many areas. Then again, thanks to RSS feeds, I read well over 150+ news articles a day all related to PC technology. The way I choose to setup Windows is definitely different than it is for most. However, I view the process as borderline artistic expression which I know is also very different than most. I'm not alone though. If you'd like to meet more Windows junkie freaks like myself, we travel in packs of thousands over at the Guru3D.com forums 
I know this is really to the subject of this thread... but couldn't resist as this is a pet peeve of mine. The evolving capabilities and the increasingly powerful resources of modern PC hardware have (in part) driven the sort of indifference to an "efficiently" running system that BOTH users AND software providers display nowadays... Don't get me wrong, I'm only a moderate tweaker... I tweak with an appreciation of the fact that disabling too many things can basically BREAK stuff "later" when you go to you use it for the first time, and cause you to encounter an error because of some long lost "tweak" you made years ago and have since forgotten the details of...
At any rate... alot of the those background services very often serve a "gainful" purpose in the eyes of the software provider... they load up a bunch of dependent stuff behind the scenes so that you "perceive" the application to "start" quickly when you actually click on it's program icon... but of course it's a tradeoff against increasingly longer system start times.
Personally, I've tried over the years to take a minimalist approach to my apps... I like them to be as small and as speedy as possible. Every so often I'm pleasantly astounded at how some utility programs seem to cram so much functionality into so small an executable...