Do you have a network card installed, and is it connected to an active network? Does disabling the card in Device Manager make any difference?

Not sure how that would be related to the VxD installation, but it can definitely cause a slow windows start.

The usual cause for slow windows load with the SB drivers installed is that you have a large soundfont selected. The drivers - maybe just the VXD drivers? not sure - are very slow at loading soundfonts during boot. If you can pick a smaller soundfont, it might help. On one of my computers with a Live! card, moving the mouse while the windows boot was hanging sped it up quite a bit, somehow!

There's also been a post about using Audigy drivers for SB Live cards on Windows 98, it's possible that might help. I haven't tried it myself.

Thanks a lot for the reply.

Here is a picture of the current SoundFont setup (I did not change anything about this).

After installing the driver that by itself will make Win98SE slower, here are some loading speed tests:

58 seconds -> Soundcard Disabled
2:20 minutes -> Soundcard Enabled

The network card has nothing to do with this. I will try that Audigy driver see how it goes.