startup problem in WinXP

[suicidal_monkey]

my pc seems to be doing something strange on startup...

WinXPpro starts seemingly as normal, goes through the usual screens, but when it gets to showing the desktop it just sort of stops - no icons, no windows start bar, just my background picture. ctrl-alt-del brings up the task manager and using that I can restart the pc and then it's fine. The problem appears to lie with explorer.exe because sometimes that process has to be ended on this reboot. sometimes by ending the explorer.exe process I can get the pc going if the explorer.exe restarts properly.

any ideas?

[Anonymous]

Can you boot into safe mode?
 
Might be a background program causing a stall. You can avoid loading programs from the startup folder by holding down the SHIFT key during boot:
 
To use the SHIFT key to disable programs and shortcuts in startup folders
 
1. Log off the computer.
2. In the Welcome to Windows dialog box, press Ctrl+Alt+Del.
3. In the Log On to Windows dialog box, type your user name and password and then click OK.
4. Immediately hold down the SHIFT key. The mouse cursor changes shape from a plain pointer to a pointer with an hourglass. (It might do this several times.)
5. Continue to hold down the SHIFT key until the Windows XP Professional desktop icons appear and the mouse cursor stops changing shape.

[Jamoe]

I came across this or something similiar the other day. If u bring up the task manager and find explorer.exe and try and bring it to focus (I clicked on it frantically). Seems to kick start it again. I don't know what had happened but it might be worth a try.

This was on a laptop running windows2000 which i connected to the net
without any updates or firewall. :unsure: Needless to say it ended up being a reformat.

Might want to consider a virus scan.

[sulky_uk]

i would run a virus scan followed by something like an ad-aware scan and then run a registry checker, see if that helps:thumbsup:
 
 
 
 
or you could use the distance help thingy from microsoft :lmfao:
 
soz couldnt resist the ms dig

[GhostMjr]

I had a similar problem to this with norton antivirus. It froze the start menu and some icons wouldn't display for along time after rebooting or starting from cold. You don't have norton do you? If so bin it and get avg free.

[suicidal_monkey]

don't have norton...but perhaps it's Spybot S&Ds TeaTimer thing halting at startup? only thing that springs immediately to mind as something I enabled recently...



AVG showed up nothing, and spybot/adaware/ewido showed up a bunch of tracking cookies but nothing out of the ordinary...ewido's still going, takes bloody ages now!

[BigFatCat]

What's in event viewer, any timeouts or errors?

[suicidal_monkey]

nothing sporting a yellow triangle dated today