Sygate Personal Firewall lags at startup

Since my recent XP Pro reinstall the Sygate Personal Firewall doesn't immediately activate after logon. It takes some time, usually 1 or 2 minutes, until it kicks in. I remember that I had the same problem in an older installation (not the last one, though).
I can rule out any programs running in the background and/or malware problems, because I had this right after I installed it fresh after the XP Pro reinstall.
However, I have an idea about a possible culprit...I installed VIA drivers that came with my motherboard and a utility was put into Autostart. I removed it, because I thought it might be responsible for the lagging, but nothing changed.

Still, I think it's possible that the VIA drivers are at fault. Proof for this is that all this didn't happen in my last installation when I never installed the VIA drivers, but directly executed an upgrade package (which messed up the utility, by the way). Probably I should try that again or remove the other drivers before, but I don't want to that just yet (might mess up something).
Any ideas?

Little update: I uninstalled those VIA drivers in the meantime (see my problem with the NEC burner in "Storage & Networking", which has solved itself since then). It can't be that, then. Problem still persists...