Following up on Greg and Balazs' suggestions further: since you are on XP, when AC 9 starts up, there is an 'issue' that it installs a printer driver (Amyuni PDF) every single time. This creates a system restore point. Your security settings may be protecting you from driver installations, perhaps, too.
So, yes, definitely disable all security apps and see what happens.
Another possibility, mentioned by others elsewhere, is that you might have a mapped network drive that is not connected.
Also: is anything else running on your computer when you start AC (you mention many other applications). Given your 512MB memory, a lot of swapping could be taking place and perhaps your hard disk is fragmented and/or as Balazs wonders, tight on space.
Karl
PS Also, once you resolve this issue, 512MB RAM is the minimum for XP Pro to perform reasonably. Things will run OK, but you will be happier if you can boost your memory.
One of the forum moderators
AC 28 USA and earlier • macOS Sequoia 15.2, MacBook Pro M2 Max 12CPU/30GPU cores, 32GB