[judibob]

My G4 with 10.3.7 has just developed an issue at startup. I get past the point where the white box goes away, then my desktop background appears. At that point, the cursor is in the upper left hand corner of the screen, as an arrow. Then it turns to that thing I have come to hate with this OS - the spinning colered wheel. It sits there for a long time, 2-3 minutes, before the finder starts and the startup sequence is complete.
Well, during that hang, I have found I can bring up my dock (no finder functional though) and open other apps on there. A few icons come up in the upper RH corner, like the airport icon, modem, time/date, battery, etc. I can pick the airport icon, and even get the dialup process started to get online. (I work through an airport using the internal modem to dial-up).
I have also found that by turning airport off prior to shutdown that this problem does not occur. If airport is off, the problem does not occur.
It just seems like the finder is hanging up looking/waiting for something.
Another issue, maybe related, maybe not, is that my mac help has always had a similar hangup problem. That problem has gotten worse with this onset of this new issue as well. When I go to the help, I get that dreaded spinning wheel, and I'm D.I.W. for a minute or two until whatever is going on has run it's course.
I've gone through using fsck, disk utility, etc. to try to solve startup problems, but still no luck.
If anyone has any idea of what is causiing this issue, and/or how it may be solved, I would appreciate the help! And, any insight on the slow help viewer response would be appreciated as well!
Thanks much,
Bob