While working on my daughter's unit it is quite apparent that loading the Control Panel is painfully slow. This is an adequate machine with good speed and Ram and running Win XP. Once the CP loads it can be kept alive and immediately restores on recall. We've done the registry cleaning and defrag and yet the issue persists. Any idea pn how we get this moving better?

The components of the Control Panel are files located in the Windows/System32 directory that end in .cpl.  Most of those are put there by Windows but sometimes other software that you install will put their own .cpl file in there.  My guess is that one of those files is hanging things up.  It is probably one of the non-Windows components.  If you suspect one of them to be the problem, you can rename the ending in Windows Explorer to something other than .cpl and it should be bypassed (you would have to restart the computer before finding out it that worked).  I don't think that Windows keeps a list of the components in the registry.  I think it just looks in the Windows/System32 directory and loads the .cpl files there.