Audio lag/delay upon Windows startup?

[Reyngel]

I've just finished installing all of my drivers after a clean install of XP. One thing I noticed was that recently upon a reboot/startup due to driver installations, the Windows startup wav file is lagged quite a bit... maybe 10-15 seconds. And if a notification window pops up, the little ding wav sound file is also delayed for about 10 seconds. Like, the notification window will pop up, and then 10 seconds later, the ding goes off. This didn't happen some months back when I had everything up and running, and it didn't happen at the beginning of my driver recovery process.

After a minute or so, the lag for audio goes away.

Any clues? It's really annoying.