Boot Problems

[JoshLyman]

Hey guys,

I've been having a problem with my start-up on my PC.

I have a dell Core2 Duo E4500 @ 2.2ghz with vista business sp1 and 2gb ram.

my computer keeps freezing for about 4-5 minutes when i boot it up, once i've entered windows and the desktop comes up and it begins to load my various tray programs.

Currently these are AVG 9.0, Comodo firewall, Spyware doctor - free version, i've disabled sidebar and msn, and recently switched out avira antivirus as it always appeared to be at that point (avira starting up) that it would freeze.

Scanned with avira, avg9, spybot and spyware doctor - cant find any probs

Any ideas as to what could be causing it?

[Pete_C]

Scanned with avira, avg9, spybot and spyware doctor - cant find any probs

One and only one antivirus. Two can cause issues; false positives or missed infections.

The other thing that comes to mind is that there is an automatic updater which is set to check for updates during the loading of the program and it is having problems getting online to do so . I have encountered others recently with problems caused by spyware doctor's automatic updater not responding (although their problem was during shut down when it would not allow the program to close).

The next thing that comes to mind is your mentioning of disabling things. If done incorrectly (IE you used MSCONFIG to prevent startup entries from running) there can be serious problems and delays because modern operating systems have many different locations for startup entries and not just the two registry sections (HKLM Run and HKCU run) addressed by MSCONFIG starutp. There are services (loaded by the different hives) , ssodl entries, winlogon entries, scheduled tasks and many other locations where things can launch. If you disable part of an application but it has components loading elsewhere they can cause massive slowdowns as they keep checking to see if the rest of the application has started up yet.

Another common cause of slow boots is mapped drives. If you map a folder on a networked drive or removable drive or networked computer to your computer as a virtual drive; if that folder is not accessible (the network is not accessibe, the computer / drive is not turned on.....) then there can be a delay as windows repeatedly searches for that folder to load as a drive.