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Problem after XP startup, help?

N

NeuroMaster

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jun 12, 2002
Messages
346
Over the last few weeks I've been having a problem with my laptop. After windows has finished loading and brings up the desktop, the taskbar freezes. I can still do anything that doesn't require the bar/start button (like start programs that are on my desktop), but any clicks on the bar etc don't go through until 1-2 minutes later. I've tried disabling all startup items with msconfig and it doesn't appear to make any difference. I've tried halting and restarting explorer.exe with task manager, but the behavior only occurs during a fresh start - re-starting explorer later on doesn't exhibit the 1-2 minute delay.

I'm wracking my brain trying to figure out what could be wrong. I don't want to start disabling services at random, and I don't want to reinstall XP at the moment. Can anyone help? I can provide further details on the machine if it'll help a diagnosis.

Ninja edit: I'm running SP2, if that's relevant.
 
might be a strong dose of spyware or even a virus..if not may be a specific dll or somthing..you should also google any suspicious looking processes. there might be processes not showing up on the task manager, services.msc, or msconfig........run a full system scan with an AS or AV program......NOD32 works wonders for virusses
 
AdAware, Spybot, and NOD32 all think I'm clean. Problem's still there. Googled every process in task manager. Everything's legit.

I'm stumped.
 
Almost sounds like a networking / driver delay. As in, windows is still trying to load a network setting that it can't get or a driver is having problems with something that it can't find. I think that you can still get bootvis and have it analyze that startup. You should have a better idea there what is causing the problem by looking at what is taking the longest time at startup.

Alternatively, you might just try to disable the network card to see if that's causing the issue. XP should be able to handle network errors better that previous OS's, but if you are trying to map a network drive that it can't find, it may cause some grief.

Take a look to see if there is any driver looking for a piece of hardware that isn't there (IIRC, some old HP All-in-One's would pitch a fit if it couldn't find the printer on startup, sometimes making the PC unusable for a few minutes until you told it 3(!) times that the printer wasn't there).

 
Thanks for pointing out bootvis. I think you might be right - bootvis shows the logon + service phase to be the one that's getting dragged out, and a 119.99sec network delay with mrxsmb.sys.

My thoughts:
119.99sec is a very suspicious number. It's way too close to 2 minutes, and I'm willing to bet that it'll be exactly the same if I ran bootvis again. Sounds like something is set to keep trying to do something for 2 minutes, then give up.

I need my network connection so I can't just delete/disable this. What to do?

The only marginally relevant entries in the event viewer relate to the TmPreFilter, VSApiNt and TmFilter services, which fail to start because the system cannot find the file specified. Google doesn't have much to say about these services, but this page makes me believe they might be a part of an old installation of the Trend Micro antivirus software.

<rant>
Goddamn information tech center here on campus offers "free antivirus" software at no charge to students. I think it might be a good idea to check this out. Not only does the standard installation never even manage to update itself much less funcion properly, when I try to uninstall the piece of crap it prompts me for a password. Needless to say, I never specified one! When I take it back to the techs at information technology services, they shrug and inform me that none of them use it, and it's a piece of crap. Then it takes them 20 minutes to crawl through the registry removing every last reference to the thing by hand.
</rant>

The more I learn about this problem, the more I'm afraid I'm going to be stuck reinstalling XP. Can anyone help me avoid that? Or will I be posting a "How to safely reinstall XP on a laptop?" thread in the near future?
 
Any error in Event Viewer?

Try using a fixed IP for your lan card and see if it makes a difference

0ldmX
 
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