'Nother Windows myster to be solved

Factual Questions
1

Briefly, a Dell desktop running WinXP Home, about two years old. A wireless router for my laptop, which works OK. A while ago had a complete crash, but got everything back by restoring from my Retrospect backup on an external HDD.

Everything works just fine, but, naturally, there is one weird glitch.

For more than a week, every time I boot in the morning, it loads to the desktop, installs six of the eight startup program icons in the System Tray, and then freezes. Mouse cursor moves, but won’t do anthing if click on any icon.

So, I turn off by holding down the start button on the box, wait 30 seconds or so, and start again. This time it works perfectly for the rest of the day.

Unless, i try to do a Restart with the Start/Turn Off Computer. Then when it boots back up, the same as the “First Time Boot of the Day” problem. Everything frozen until I turn it off and back on again.

I have a program that shows the CPU and box temperature, and they are fine. I opened the box, and all fans are working.

I have a Seagate drive, so went to their site and downloaded and ran a program that checks the HDD, and all is well.Absolutely no noises from the drive.

I tried disabling each startup program one by one, and this did not correct it. I disabled both of the two icons that won’t load the first time, made no difference.

I really think this is a software problem, but what te hell it is beats me.

Gurus, I await your quick-fix suggestions.

2

You can prove it is a software problem by holding down the F8 key during Startup and booting into Safe Mode. If it works fine the first time, it is a software issue. You can also go to Start --> Control Panel --> System --> Hardware Tab --> Device manager and make sure that there aren’t any drivers that show errors. If there are, you can usually just right -click to uninstall it and let the system find it again and reinstall it to make it work.

3

The last time I had something like this it turned out to be a problem with the video driver.

4

Thanks, Shagnasty, I’ve done both of those. Can get into Safe Mode (that is how I did my Restore last week), but tried it again just to be sure. I had looked at Device Manager, and looked again, no errors anywhere there.

As I suspected, it is likely a software problem. Stupid Windows. :smiley:

5

Exactly what I was thinking. Try getting a different version. Or tweaking the Hardware Acceleration under the System Properties.

Oh, and just because Safe Mode works doesn’t mean that there’s not a hardware problem. Safe Mode doesn’t load your regular video driver. The driver could be using a part of your card that is broken.

6

What happens if you leave it 5 minutes?

7

You mean when it opens to the desktop, but then freezes? Yeah, I have waited well over five minutes. What happens? Nothing.:mad:

8

Unplug the attached USB devices except the keyboard and mouse (if they are USB) and see if the freeze happens.

9

First, try logging in without running the Startup item (Left Shift key being held down after logon will do this, or maybe the Right shift key, I can no longer remember). If that works, manually launch the startup programs to see what fails.
Disable Autologon and see if the system locks up after a period at the logon screen - this indicates a driver or service, eliminating the startup programs. Use F8 and select a logged boot. The bootlog may tell you which driver or service has locked up the machine.

Si

10

Thanks, all, for the many ideas on how to fix the problem.

The good news is that they all seem to be very logical, and apt to fix things.

The bad news is that I have tried each of these, and so far nothing has worked.

Am I the first one to ever experience this Windows anomaly? Do I win the gold plated chamber pot?

It strikes me as totally weird that the first boot of the day freezes, while after turning it off and rebooting, everything works just fine for the rest of the day. Perhaps my computer is haunted?

Keep those suggestions coming folks. If all else fails, I’ll call Bill Gates.

11

Move the mouse and keyboard to different USB ports.

12

Great idea.

Did it work? Uh, well, unfortunately no.

It did give me the idea to replace the keyboard with another, but that did not make any difference either.

13

What normally hangs systems in the way you are describing are driver related issues.

Go to control panel>system> hardware>device manager. Click on the “+” boxes to expand the branches. Is there any device on these branches marked with an exclamation point symbol?

Are all CDs & DVDs out of the CD/DVD trays?

Did the hanging start right after the re-install or did the system work normally for a while?

14

  1. Device Manager. Been there, done that. :smiley: Everything is OK

  2. All trays empty.

  3. Hanging started right after the restore.

15

The idea of waiting 5 mins was to make sure that something isn’t waiting to time out.

Load up bootlog.txt or winbtlog.txt as appropriate and tell us the last entries.

If you look in Event Viewer, the System Log, is there anything with a red icon?

You can test the video driver possibility by uninstalling the current video driver and installing the plain VGA one.

But it’s just occurred to me that I saw a very similar problem some months ago. Do you have Norton anti-virus installed? If so, remove it.

16

Lord no, I would not touch Norton (nor McAfee) with the proverbial ten-foot pole. Although, back in the old days Norton Disk Doctor and others were pretty good. I use Avast now.

Thanks for the other ideas, will check them out tomorrow.

17

Other things to try (some might be time consuming):

  1. Update the BIOS
  2. Take a backup image of the current state of your drive with Acronis True Image
  3. Upgrade Windows XP to Windows XP. If this works, then it’s a software issue. Restore the Acronis backup and try to diagnose the driver/process causing the hang. Or if all installed software works fine, you might not need to restore.
  4. If it doesn’t work, restore from your last known good backup (from the Retrospect backups). If it works, it’s a software issue
  5. It it doesn’t work, it’s a hardware issue

One other quick way to check if it’s a video driver issue:

  1. Set the screen resolution to 800x600. Reboot.
  2. If it doesn’t work, uninstall the video driver. Reboot.

The strange thing is this “first boot of the day doesn’t work” issue. If you can’t figure out the problem, one workaround is to map the hardware button to Hibernate so you never really shut down, and then you can reboot once a month or so.

18

From reading around on the Internet, this issue of “first boot crashes” seems to be due to a power supply/voltage/RAM mismatch.

Here are my updated instructions:

  1. Update the BIOS. See if it works after BIOS update.
  2. If you have 2 sticks of RAM, try booting with just 1. Try it in a different slot. Play around with different combinations.

See here for more info:

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/278169-31-weird-problem-boot-crashes-hard-reset-fixes