# Windows XP Freezing at Select User
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/windows-xp-freezing-at-select-user/478795
**Category:** Factual Questions
**Created:** [December 27, 2008, 12:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/windows-xp-freezing-at-select-user/478795 "2008-12-27T00:29:03Z")
**Posts on this page:** 5
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Sailboat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sailboat)
#### Post date: [December 27, 2008, 12:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/windows-xp-freezing-at-select-user/478795/1 "2008-12-27T00:29:03Z")
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.
Is this a known and solvable issue?
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### Author:  [@Madgolf](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Madgolf)
#### Post date: [December 27, 2008, 12:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/windows-xp-freezing-at-select-user/478795/2 "2008-12-27T00:33:04Z")
Does the mouse freeze? If you can ctrl-alt-delete for Task Manager, do that and start a “New Task” under “applications” which will be “explorer”.
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### Author:  [@Sailboat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sailboat)
#### Post date: [December 27, 2008, 1:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/windows-xp-freezing-at-select-user/478795/3 "2008-12-27T01:05:24Z")
I don’t remember. I’ll see what happens next time.
Thanks!
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### Author:  [@Turble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Turble)
#### Post date: [December 27, 2008, 3:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/windows-xp-freezing-at-select-user/478795/4 "2008-12-27T15:07:58Z")
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.
Good luck.
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### Author:  [@GSV\_Consolation\_of\_Dreams](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GSV_Consolation_of_Dreams)
#### Post date: [December 27, 2008, 3:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/windows-xp-freezing-at-select-user/478795/5 "2008-12-27T15:53:46Z")
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.