Long boot time to desktop

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When I reboot my machine, things go fine until I get the green screen (desktop background), and then it takes upwards of 15-20 minutes to get the rest of the desktop (icons and such). This has been going on for a couple of months and I’ve been unable to find the cause. Does anyone have a clue as to possible causes? Particulars are:

Running XP SP3, 1.5 ghx Athlon processor

Dunno what other info is needed. Would appreciate any help. Thanks.

Phil

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There must be some process or app that is having problems. You may want to stop apps from loading at startup to see if this will solve the problem, then begin starting the apps again one at a time until the problem comes back. Most app, when first installed, think they should always start at windows startup, which is absolutely false. Most do NOT need to be running in the background.

First, perhapss everything you need to T/S this will be seen on msconfig. Run, msconfig. The Startup tab shows apps that load during startup. Uncheck all but your AV app, then on the General tab choose Selective startup. Check the first 2 items then reboot and see what happens. This may be all you need to find the offending app. As an example, other than normal Windows services, the only apps I allow to start with Windows are my AV app and because I use a laptop, my touchpad app. NO other apps start. These apps do not have to be running at Windows startup. You can start them when you need them.

A more powerful app for this process is available at Autoruns.The startup tab will shown apps starting with Windows.

I would also use a program such as CCleanerto clean up temp files and many other areas where large numbers of files tend to accumulate. I would include the Prefetch area in this. This allows a major cleanup that often slows things down.

If all else fails, you can do a system reinstall. This will give you the opportunity to clean out those apps you never use any more.

On another note, system slowdowns could be related to hardware problems, but the above options will be easier to check, and generally less expensive. I hope this helps.

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Ed Bott’s Windows Expertise, Tip of the day: Troubleshoot slow startups. Part 1
Ed Bott’s Windows Expertise, Tip of the day: Troubleshoot slow startups, Part 2 October 18th, 2005
diagnose slow xp boot
Advanced troubleshooting for general startup problems in Windows XP
Windows XP Slow Startup and Shutdown
Restore Your Computer’s Performance with Windows XP
How to Make Windows XP Startup Faster
Troubleshoot slow startup by looking at startup events
_______________________________________________________
Langa Letter: A Complete PC Maintenance Checklist
Langa Letter: Laptop Setup Secrets
Langa Letter: A New Way To Slim Down Windows, Including SP2
Langa Letter: Ten Ways To Make Windows XP Run Better
Langa Letter: Ten More Ways To Make Windows XP Run Better
Langa Letter: System Setup Secrets For Windows XP

Google

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Thank you both very much for your responses. Nothing seemed to help. However, in retrospect, my Microsoft mouse has been a little flakey for a while, so I got to wondering if that could be the problem. So I d/l’ed the latest mouse driver software from M’soft for my Microsoft wheel mouse, installed it and the long boot times went away. Apparently, my old mouse.drv in the system32 directory is broken.

Ted, I have autoruns and ccleaner both, and had used them to no avail. Msconfig didn’t help much either. I appreciate your suggestions.

Clint, those are all excellent troubleshooting sources, but they don’t really address a boot problem specifically. Unless I’m missing something, they mostly are in the area of general speed-up type of troubleshooting. Nevertheless, I really appreciate the suggestions.

Thanks.

Phil

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Just alittle more information armour for the fight.
Boot issues can have a wide variety of etiologies, a problematic driver is but one.

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It’s good information that the mouse S/W was causing the problem. This may help the next person with similar symptoms. Drivers are notorious for causing wierd problems including loooong boot times. Glad your problem is solved.

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A new app for troubleshooting boot times:
http://www.soluto.com/

Jerry

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A new app for troubleshooting boot times:
http://www.soluto.com/

Jerry

I installed Soluto yesterday and deleted (or delayed) unnecessary startup items with the help of Soluto’s very informative GUI and managed to nearly half my boot-up time. This is just released (beta) free software and quite different from the many other startup managers out there. I highly recommend it and am sure we’ll hear a lot more about it when it becomes better known.

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Hi Phil Gentry

I may have a possible reason why your PC is running slow or booting slow as in my case. My PC (XP Pro SP3) took 10 to 20 minutes to totally reboot / the taskbar. It was driving me crazy, until I could finally get the task manger to popup during the reboot. I noticed my CPU was running at 99% and looked down the list of running processes and found that the “DivX 8 Plus”, DivXUdate.exe was causing this problem.

I then used MSconfig and STOPPED DivXUpdate.exe from starting up. BINGO!!! I rebooted my PC, problem solved. I may go back to DivX 7.2, but so far the DivXUpdate.exe has not started with my reboot. I also deleted DivXUdate.exe from the Prefetch folder. I will not be updating DivX 8.1 Plus for quite sometime.

This DivX 8.1 Plus problem doesn’t seem to effect the PC I use at work with Vista installed (Yuck).

I don’t know if this was any help to you, but maybe to others with their PC’s booting up slowly in the last month or week or two as was my case. Take care.

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Use TuneUp Utilities 2010 & CCleaner & Winxp AntiSpy it is the best apps to optimize your PC.

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Use TuneUp Utilities 2010 & CCleaner & Winxp AntiSpy it is the best apps to optimize your PC.

No offense but can I thumbs down this post? XP Antispy reallyt? I just jacked this excerpt from softpedia on the download for xp antispy and i almost fell off my chair laughing. here it is.

XP-AntiSpy is a little utility that lets you disable some built-in update and authetication ‘features’ in WindowsXP.

For example, there’s a service running in the background wich is called ‘Automatic Updates’. I don`t know what this service transfers from my machine to other machines on the internet, especially the MS ones. So I play it safe and disable such functions.

If you like, you can even disable these function manually, by going through the System and checking or unchecking some checkboxes. This will take you approximately half an hour. But why wasting time when a little neat utility can do the same in 1 minute?

XP-Antispy was successfully tested by many users and was found to disable all the known ‘Suspicious’ Functions in WindowsXP.

Am i the only one that finds that absolutely halarious..and rediculous. oh, not to mention the fact that XP Antispy is ROGUE ANTISPYWARE…sheesh. There needs to be some rules on what kind of stuff you can recommend to people. That post should be modified or deleted before someone follows his advise and wrecks their computer.

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No offense but can I thumbs down this post? XXXXXXX reallyt? I just jacked this excerpt from softpedia on the download for XXXXXXXX and i almost fell off my chair laughing. here it is.

XXXXXXXX is a little utility that lets you disable some built-in update and authetication ‘features’ in WindowsXP.

For example, there’s a service running in the background wich is called ‘Automatic Updates’. I don`t know what this service transfers from my machine to other machines on the internet, especially the MS ones. So I play it safe and disable such functions.

If you like, you can even disable these function manually, by going through the System and checking or unchecking some checkboxes. This will take you approximately half an hour. But why wasting time when a little neat utility can do the same in 1 minute?

XXXXXXXX was successfully tested by many users and was found to disable all the known ‘Suspicious’ Functions in WindowsXP.

Am i the only one that finds that absolutely halarious..and rediculous. oh, not to mention the fact that XXXXXXX is ROGUE ANTISPYWARE…sheesh. There needs to be some rules on what kind of stuff you can recommend to people. That post should be modified or deleted before someone follows his advise and wrecks their computer.

I reported the post you mention as a possible problem to the moderators. Hopefully they will delete it. (I XXXXX out the name of the app so this should not have to be deleted as well)

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9 times out of 10, msconfig stopping APPS from starting will usually fix startup problems (of course after hardware failure has been ruled out, which should be always step 1). In some cases it can be bad services and I have found the easiest way to diagnose this is to go to the services tab in msconfig, hide all microsoft services and then disabling all else. This can resolve issues where msconfig startup doesnt. HOWEVER

I ran into a computer yesterday that was giving startup issues. Hardware all passed, 1gb ram. Turned of all non-ms services and apps from startup. Tweaked to the max..still nothing. So i noticed that the windows xp theme was not available (it was stuck on classic mode) so I deciced to do some google searching to find out where the theme went. I found out that this was caused by the theme service being stopped…so i started it and blammo…windows xp normal theme again. I thought it was kind of weird that the service was set to manual instead of the default setting of automatic and it got me thinking. The guy who used this computer was one of those “thinks they know stuff bout puters” kind of guy so i fugured he probably “tweaked” the system to make it run better. After some seraching on google i came across blackviper.com (awesome services site) and found their default settings registry key. Ran that for the right OS/bit and BAM, system startup went from 10 minutes to 10 seconds (from the time you see th ebackground to seeing icons and a fully functioning explorer).

Its amazing what can happen just from changing services out of their default selection.

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I know I’m a little late on this but I just solved some long boot problems with XP which I am running dual boot with Windows 7. I used MSCONFIG to disable all my startup programs. Since I did this only Google toolbar is starting at startup. I also went to system performance settings and activated the button to adjust for best performance. If you’re not fussy about the way windows are presented this is a one click way to speed up your machine. I also did same in Windows 7 and it made a significant difference.

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Try smartbuster.

http://www.rovatronic.net/SmartBuster.htm

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Bear with me, I’m no expert. This post is of interest b/c I have the slow boot problem – XP, all updates, use Firefox. The problem is fairly recent. I have disabled some things in startup, but what’s left is this – (I don’t know what they are, except tea timer) 53 apphk, WkUFind,, REGSHAVE, avgtray (AVG is installed), Tea Timer, ctfmon. Is there something here that would be causing a problem?

I should add that in the task bar during this delay, the spybot symbol takes a long time to appear, although I don’t think it’s part of startup?

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Tea Timer sounds like part of the spybot program. I’d leave the AVG alone and start troubleshooting some of the others by disabling them. You could start with the Tea Timer. Consider removing Spybot Search & Destroy as a start up item from within
the program itself and not from msconfig.

WkUFind; MS Works should be safe to remove from startup.
53 apphk; I do not know what this is. Use Autoruns and or Process Explorer to research this item more fully.
Ctfmon; Part of Word/Office installation. See link for more info.
regshave.exe; installed alongside the drivers for Fuji FinePix digital cameras. Not a critical startup item.

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A couple of things:

First, be VERY careful about declaring that an Anti-spyware program is malware! The posting suggesting XP-Antispy was probably referring to a legitimate product from a-squared, which is of limited use, but is not malware. Many malware programs have names VERY close to legitimate Antispyware products. Along the same lines, I am not familiar with Smart Buster, but the program looks interesting. I just wonder whether it has safeguards against accidentally shutting down or removing something necessary to run Windows.

Second, be VERY careful about disabling Wndows Services! Automatic Updates must be set to load with Windows if you do not want to have to go manually to the MS Updates website each month to download and install the MS Updates. Even then, you must manually enable Automatic Updates Service and set it to Automatic each time you want to download and install the updates. MS Updates will NOT WORK without this setting! BITS must also be set to Manual or Automatic to get MS Updates to work. Black Vipre notwithstanding, there is a practical limit to how much speed-tweaking you can do for Windows startup.

My own laptop has the most trouble loading its Intel ProSet Wireless Networking driver. This one can take two to five minutes to load, and sometimes does not load completely due to timing out. Updating the driver has had little effect — it is just a poorly-written driver and always will be. So drivers can certainly contribute to slow Windows load times. This situation can also be made worse by AV boot-time scans (Avast) or aggressive firewalls (Comodo or Zone Alarm). A balance between security and stability can usually be reached, but it can be a tricky detective exercise. Voice of experience here.

And, Clint, I have ctfmon active on my laptop, but I do not have any MS Works or MS Office programs, and never have had them. Other programs need this service, so I would leave it active at startup.

Could “53 apphk” really be “S3 apphk” ? That would be a video output driver application hook, and while not absolutely needed, it should be allowed to run at Windows startup.

-- rc primak

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Thank you for the info about what some of those items are. I will follow the advice. Thank you to those in the lounge who are patient with some of us, those of us who are not at all technically oriented!

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When I reboot my machine, things go fine until I get the green screen (desktop background), and then it takes upwards of 15-20 minutes to get the rest of the desktop (icons and such). This has been going on for a couple of months and I’ve been unable to find the cause. Does anyone have a clue as to possible causes? Particulars are:

Running XP SP3, 1.5 ghx Athlon processor

Dunno what other info is needed. Would appreciate any help. Thanks.

Phil

Here is a link I found very useful.
Soluto Beta allows you to understand your boot, discover which applications are slowing it down (and keep running later in the background, affecting your ongoing experience), and allows you to significantly improve it. While Soluto Beta focuses on the boot, it already researches for frustrations and helps map the PC Genome, and allows you to share your wisdom with others.
It improved my bootup time drastically.
http://www.soluto.com/Download/

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I happened onto this thread because I, too, suffered from slow boot-up with my XP.

All I can say is WOW! SOLUTO is AMAZING!!! This friendliest, non-intimidating software I’ve come across in a long time and it works fantastic!

http://www.soluto.com/Download/

Bobbie

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