This is quite a strange problem that started recently.

I turn the PC on, all is well, boot screen comes up within about 10 seconds or so after its done all the bios stuff as you would expect.

Then the windows user login screen comes up as normal, i put my password in, click on enter, the 'loading your personal settings' message comes up for about 5 seconds and disappears as usual.

Then my desktop background comes up, and thats where it all goes wrong.

All there is is the image itself, no start bar, no icons, no nothing, just the background image and the mouse, which i can move around the screen, but there is obviously nothing to click on.

I timed it earlier and it took 9 minutes and 36 seconds of this before windows itself came to life and the start bar and desktop items came up.

During this 9 minutes and 36 seconds there was no hard disk activity at all, as if no attempt is being made by my pc to load anything up whatsoever.

Once it finally came up there was plenty of hard disk activity and the disk led was flashing away as usual.

After about a minute or so of loading up.. AV, firewall, ad aware se, ATI control centre, etc.. the computer is running absolutely perfectly and there are no problems with it at all, it is in fact quite fast! (for a p4)

It is this big pause with no activity that is worrying me.

I am guessing that what is actually happening is that explorer.exe is not loading, or being prevented from loading for quite a long time somehow but i just don't know why.

If i boot in safe mode the big pause does not happen, it is about 10 seconds of waiting as normal.

Debugging mode (whatever the hell that is supposed to be) doesnt work, i get a black screen, and the mouse, which freezes totally and the PC hangs after about 2 seconds and thats how it stays. (i left it for an hour like this, got pissed off with waiting and restarted it)

These are the things i have tried so far to fix it, all of which have failed.....


* Removed all entries from the startup section of MSCONFIG apart from those needed for windows to run.

* Did a AVG 8 scan, no problems found

* Did a Adaware SE scan, no problems found

* Did a IObit advanced systemcare scan, no problems found

* Did a Spybot S&D scan, no problems found

* Ran DRwatson, no problems found

* Ran Ccleaner

* Ran JKDefrag, (HD not majorly fragged, but worth doing so i did it anyway)

* Removed all old or rubbish programs that i dont need or use much.

* Deleted lots of old stuff from my documents folders that i dont need anymore.

* Unplugged all devices apart from my keyboard and mouse (including disconnecting both cd/dvd drives from inside the computer)

* Thoroughly cleaned and removed all dust from inside the PC using 'henry the hoover'

* Removed GFX card, network card, ram and CPU fan, cleaned and refitted to make sure nothing was loose.

* Checked every single piece of wiring inside the PC to make sure its all properly connected, which it all was

* Fitted the spare big internal fan which i forgot i had got and wired it up for extra cooling.


Then i had my dinner, and a beer, and now i have truly ran out of ideas.



There is only one thing that i can think of that may have triggered it, possibly, as i managed to knock the PC over the other day by accident and it turned itself off, although if i had damaged some hardware then surely it would either not load at all or be permanantly slow??

I appreciate anyone who reads this massive post, and i thank you all in advance for any advice.


PS: LFS still works fine so not all bad!

Could be your OS is fooked?

Might be worth a quick re-partition, putting another copy of Windows on there and seeing if it still does the same thing...

Sounds like an OS start-up file is corrupted causing the long load time.

I'd do what Jack suggests and see what happens. If it still does it then there's some hardware gone wrong somewhere, maybe hard drive if you knocked it over, although as you say it would be running slow all the time if that's the case.

Certainly sounds quite odd!

Guess what, i can't find the f--king XP CD!! :banghead:

I have searched the whole flat for ages and its nowhere to be found, worst part is, i know i saw it somewhere about 2 weeks ago, i just don't know where.

Oh damn, it seems like your explorer won`t start. You can find some shell restore registry files on the net.

To confirm that, try hitting ctrl+shift+esc (task manager) > file > new task (run) : explorer.exe

It most likely happens on the current user only. Try creating another one*(user) and see how it goes.

Quote from danthebangerboy :

Guess what, i can't find the f--king XP CD!! :banghead:

I have searched the whole flat for ages and its nowhere to be found, worst part is, i know i saw it somewhere about 2 weeks ago, i just don't know where.

Well it isn't hard to get one, but I think we are not allowed to talk about that here. But if I were you, I would try to reinstall windows, and if that wouldn't help I would try another HDD. The problem should be solved at this point, but if it isn't the problem is within your CPU/GPU etc.

If you contact Microsoft they'll probably send you out a new install CD. It doesn't matter to them because it's just a disc, they're not sending out a new product key. You can use software to discover your current product key to use when reinstalling the OS. When the machine is waiting to load, can you run Task Manager (either by Ctrl+Alt+Del or Ctrl+Shift+Esc)?

I found the disk and tried to use the repair option, i tried creating a new boot sector but it made no difference. Thats as far as i have got using the disk as i only found it about half an hour ago and i need to be up at 05:30 (just over 6 hours from now) so i will continue tomorrow.

I tried the user accounts thing but again, it made no difference.

It is only the initial launch of windows itself that causes the problem, If i restart and log in on the new account the problem is still there, however, if i log off and then log back on between both accounts then the problem isnt there.

If i use the hibernate option instead of a full shutdown it doesnt do it either, so thats what i plan to do from now on, never shut down, just hibernate instead!

I have far to much stuff i need that would need backing up onto about 1235,000 CD's before i could wipe it completely, plus all my custom registry work i did to make it faster, and make it look as close as possible to vista would all be lost, and i did not write any of it down, plus it was mainly trial and error, which took me months, and many BSOD's to get it right.

I dont wanna have to do that again, as i have forgotten most of what i did or how i did it.

It'll be fine, i just will never shut it all the way down!

Do a defrag and clean your thing up. Every time I boot up from clean it takes a few minutes for me to be able to 'use' my PC. (and with a QC cpu I expect better)

I suggest putting the PC on standby as I do, if I need to restart I'll do so but it just boots up without problem. Just reinstall Windows if it's being a bitch. It does it sometimes I guess.

Next time, after you reinstall and tweak it to your taste, install teh shit you want, make sure you make a backup with Norton Ghost. Saves you all the grief to do it all over again.

Quote from STF :

Next time, after you reinstall and tweak it to your taste, install teh shit you want, make sure you make a backup with Norton Ghost. Saves you all the grief to do it all over again.

I prefer Acronis True Image but I agree. Install Windows, get things how you like them then take an image of the hard drive. In the future if things go kaput you can just copy the image from backup (external drive, DVD(s), flash drive etc). Takes a matter of minutes to copy it back compared to hours/days to install Windows, all your apps and get things configured exactly how you like them.

Well since u said u knocked over ur pc id say the hard drive was damaged...

Have you ran Chkdsk yet? A few weeks ago my pc started to bsod or take ages to boot, After chkdsk ran and found a load of damaged sectors the pc restarted was fixed....

Just type chkdsk at a command prompt to check or

chkdsk /F to check and fix

As with all fixing of hard drives, theres a slight risk that the repair will remove important files and make windows unbootable if they are stored in damaged sectors, Its only a tiny chance but thought id warn anyways...

Also, if you cant find your windows disk you can download a copy from microsoft or MSDN website somewhere...

I did the chkdsk thing yesterday and it took about 2 hours to complete and didnt solve the problem.

I took your advice and did the chkdsk /f thing and it was done in about 2 minutes. It didnt show any bad sectors but it is a lot better now as the 9 odd minute pause is down to about 30 seconds or so, which i can live with.

The only problem i have now is that my zonealarm won't initialise and i can't access the control panel for it, although it says that protection is up if i hover the mouse over it.

My mouse is also jumpy and jerky as well as i move it around the page. It keeps freezing momentarily every few seconds and then moving again, the keyboard does the same when im typing.

I think the whole pc could be freezing and unfreezing actually as if i watch anything on youtube or in WMP, load web pages or do anything with the pc the momentary lag happens at the same time as the mouse freezing does.

LFS also goes from my usual 45ish fps down to about 3 in the same way, which is a bit annoying. Maybe the firewall trying to initialise could be the cause of it, although it's not hogging the CPU when it freezes if i look in task manager.

The only other reason i can think of for this is that i have damaged the usb connections on the motherboard or that there is a conflict somewhere with my usb devices, as i couldnt remember what was plugged into which usb slot before i cleaned the case out so i just plugged things into whichever slot i saw first.

I will re arrange my devices and see if it helps.

You mentioned before you don't have stuff backed up. You should do that right NOW because your PC might decide to not boot at all soon. Sounds pretty messed up.

Get a cheap HDD and chuck all your important data in there if you can't be bothered with 23534 CD's or can't make a data partition.

Its ok, i have all my documents that i would like to keep, plus my lfs skins folder already backed up on an 8gb microsd card that fits in my 3g internet dongle thing, its just my custom registry work to make it look all vista ish that isnt backed up.

Good boy.

And goodluck.

it may or may not of been mentioned but what os are you useing ?

Im using XP home SP3. Its a bit quicker today but still very much hit and miss as to what it can cope with.

If you say you knocked it over the other day then my money is on there being a hardware problem. First I'd try to eliminate the HDD being faulty, and as far as I know the only way to to test this unless you've got a second HDD to test on is to run a live CD or live USB.

If you boot up Ubuntu and everything seems normal then hardware error is eliminated, the easiest way out imo is to download Gparted live CD, boot it up and create a second ntfs partition, move all your personal data to the partition and simply re-install Windows

If it's still borked after a fresh install and or installation of Ubuntu the problem of identifying which piece of hardware will be very tricky as something like the solder on the rear of the board may have come loose and only making partial continuity with the rest of the system.

Good luck

Try to boot from a live cd (like Ubuntu has). If it works fine then it is probably your OS (but could also still be a dieing harddisk).

^^ what he said

Do you have an active network connection (wireless or otherwise)? If so try booting it up with the network connection disabled, any cables unplugged (and/or your router turned off), I had a similar problem a couple of years ago, it turned out to be a ballsed up network

It got really bad again so i bit the bullet and reinstalled windows XP.

Now i'm totally f--ked!

Turns out the version of xp i have on disk is only xp sp1.

As soon as i connected to the web and tried to get avg8 and zonealarm back on my pc, they won't install because they need sp2 or higher.

So i thought i would go to microsoft and d/l sp2. Cant do that either.

Because i have no protection, it was full of spyware and viruses within seconds, my hosts file is nackered, and had changed all outgiong ip addresses that involve microsoft sites to 127.0.0.1 (loopback ip) so i cant access or d/l anything from them.

I have all kinds of junk on my c drive such as exe files called hellmsn, jpeg's that werent there before, etc...

So im stuck in a never ending circle now. Cant use my av or firewall as im not updated, cant update because viruses have got me and blocking like f--k.

New pc time i think.

Why can't you download SP2? Surely you just use the Windows update thing. You don't get spyware just like that... going to google, typing Windows Service Pack 2, gonig to a Microsoft site and downloading it won't magically give you spyware/viruses. Infact, unless you visit dodgy sites and download wierd things you don't even need Anti virus protection.

Fresh xp install + sp3 network install + a few tweaks + ... (java, .net, av, fw, etc) + updates + backup = .. love.