There seems to be a lot of talk about this online, but I have given a cursory read through several sites and not yet found consistent agreement on the solution. I googled “Windows XP Freezing on welcome Screen” and got around 174,000 hits.
I have experienced this and now a friend has called with what sounds like the same issue. When booting, if I select my username while the mouse cursor is still an hourglass, I get to my wallpaper but have no icons, no taskbar, nothing – it appears completely frozen.
If I wait a few moments for the hourglass to subside, I either never get this or almost never get this, depending on the accuracy of my observations.
Sounds like what I went through a couple weeks ago. I don’t use a wallpaper so I just booted to a black screen; no icons, no taskbar, just the arrow cursor which the mouse would move … Ctrl-Alt-Del didn’t work, in fact, the only keypress that did anything was when pressing Shift five times fast I could hear the sound for sticky keys (coming from the PC speaker, not from my desktop speakers), but that was it.
I did a lot of research on the web and found lots of suggestions like “sfc / scannow” and “fixmbr” but nothing worked … even tried a repair install of Windows with no effect. None of those things seemed to work for the other sufferers either, by the way. I could boot with a Ubuntu CD and see all my files on the drive, so I knew it wasn’t hardware.
I ended up buying an external drive, installed XP on it, booted to the new drive, copied my files, and then did a clean install of XP on the old drive.
Could be a corrupted user profile. Log in as admin or another user with admin privileges, then rename C:\Documents and Settings\ProblemuserName to something like ProblemUsername.bak
Reboot, and log in as ProblemUserName. XP should create a fresh profile to which you can copy your My Documents etc.