system tray freezes and closes

I just got a Dell and I have windows xp home edition on
it. I have norton anti virus, the dell support alerts
and sometimes yahoo mess running in the sys tray. Xp
takes a long time to hide the inactive icons and
sometimes I will loose the norton anti virus. The arrow
thingy to see the hidden icons is not there and acts as
if the auto-hide feature is not on. I have it on. One
other thing in commom with this, xp will start up, but it
takes approxamatly 3 minutes for the system tray to
load. Any thoughts would help. Thank you.