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When I boot up my system I get a strange result: I get a blank screen before the desktop comes up and it remains "blank" for about 1 min. and then the desktop shows up in all of my startup items begin to run.

I've tried turning it off with msconfig and the same thing happens – about a minute or so of "dead" screen.

Any idea of what is going on?

Ƭᴇcʜιᴇ007
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greenber
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    "dead screen"... Does that mean it shows black, white, or your wallpaper? – RobinJ Nov 14 '11 at 19:37
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    Have you got any mapped network drives, or external devices that it may be waiting on? Does it do this when booting into Safe Mode? What was "it" that you turned off via MSConfig? – Ƭᴇcʜιᴇ007 Nov 14 '11 at 19:58
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    is just showing my wallpaper. No mapped drives, a number of external devices, but the same thing happens if I disable them. I turned off all of my startup items and tried rebooting on a "clean" system. – greenber Nov 14 '11 at 20:25
  • Did you try Safe Mode? – Ƭᴇcʜιᴇ007 Nov 14 '11 at 21:04
  • yes, I tried Safe Mode. It doesn't really show me anything since there is such a sizable delay in redrawing the icons. I can tell you only about the delay I'm speaking of happened some time between the bios "reset" and the operating system/desktop becoming available. – greenber Nov 14 '11 at 21:38

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This can be a sign of a corrupt user account (or possibly malware), you better create another admin account before the current one fails completely, this way you can still log on as an admin to troubleshoot and possibly repair the old account. Try enabling Boot Logging, then restart and have a look at the logs.

Try a clean boot to see if the problem resolves itself, if it does then it is a startup Program or 3rd party service causing it.

Community
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Moab
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  • I always have two administration accounts(think belt *and* suspenders)I was just about to try boot logging… – greenber Nov 14 '11 at 21:57
  • Does it do this for all accounts? – Moab Nov 14 '11 at 22:36
  • yes, it does unfortunately – greenber Nov 14 '11 at 23:19
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    probably not a user profile issue then, have you scanned for malware yet? See the link I posted. – Moab Nov 15 '11 at 01:07
  • Yes, I scanned for malware: using both Avast (for viruses) and malwarebytes (for nastyware) – both came up clean. The Boot Log I got through ProcMon does not appear as with the help file that you forwarded me – from above – can you give me a hand in deciphering it? – greenber Nov 15 '11 at 02:25
  • Yes, I ran the Microsoft System Sweeper and it came up clean. I still do not understand how to interpret the ProcMon Boot Log. It did cut a PML file: perhaps I should send that to you? – greenber Nov 15 '11 at 14:10
  • Where should I e-mail it? It's a big file (about 2.5 GB) and I cannot upload it to my sky drive… – greenber Nov 15 '11 at 18:35
  • This is getting weirder and weirder! Now, when I try to run Process Monitor I get a hard lockup. The system locks up entirely – the mouse cursor is gone, control alt delete does nothing at all and I have to power off and reboot to get my system live again. And then comes the reboot problem. I am able to compress/zip up the boot log and it is down to about 190 K. I just finished running an SFC and the came up clean. I downloaded a new copy of Process Monitor from the Microsoft System Internals site but when I run it I get the same lockup. I'm running out of ideas. Do you have any? – greenber Nov 16 '11 at 02:11
  • Did you try the clean boot? – Moab Nov 16 '11 at 02:55
  • of course .... first thing I tried b4 coming here – greenber Nov 16 '11 at 15:55
  • I was finally able to upload a RAR/zip file of my boot log to my sky drive. Here's the URL:http://tinyurl.com/7peydaq – greenber Nov 17 '11 at 15:58
  • can i learn something from the event viewer? – greenber Nov 17 '11 at 20:27
  • Now this is strange! Through msconfig I enable boot logging through the boot tab. When I booted and then looked at the generated boot log I thought nothing really strange, except for a bunch of "did not load device driver" messages (hence the query about the event viewer, above) him. Him him however when I log onto my secondary administration user there is now no delay. Perhaps I should just load my existing (but buggy) profile into the new admin user? Or should I continue trying to fix the broken user? – greenber Nov 18 '11 at 18:18
  • Move the profile to the new user. – Moab Nov 18 '11 at 21:48
  • how? Do I need to reinstall progs and start-up items and device driver loads? – greenber Nov 18 '11 at 22:54
  • This is for XP but is very similar for vista or W7, scroll down to "Copying your user profile" or "Moving to a new user profile"...http://www.lockergnome.com/it/2004/12/15/get-it-done-recover-a-damaged-windows-xp-user-profile/ – Moab Nov 19 '11 at 00:22
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I don't have that much experience with 7, but a black screen for a relatively long period (probably only 20 seconds, but seems like several minutes) is not unusual during boot-up on Vista.

Daniel R Hicks
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  • no, this just started happening. The only thing that I had done was to install SP1 on Visual Studio; uninstalling it had no effect. One of the things I enjoyed about transiting from Vista to Windows 7 was a faster startup time. I'm hoping that I don't have to reinstall. The boot up repair found nothing wrong. – greenber Nov 15 '11 at 14:16
  • There used to be a setting in Windoze that would enable a startup log. Don't recall the details, but you might try to find that. – Daniel R Hicks Nov 15 '11 at 18:29
  • How about network drives? I suspect that on our box at home the delay is related to a network drive. – Daniel R Hicks Nov 15 '11 at 19:56
  • nope....stand alone PC...I recall that setting as well,,,from safe mode, maybe? – greenber Nov 16 '11 at 15:58
  • [Here](http://support.microsoft.com/kb/835557) is some old info on the startup log. – Daniel R Hicks Nov 17 '11 at 01:07
  • Apparently you press F8 while Windows is booting and it brings up a menu where you can enable logging. I see some disagreement as to the name and location of the log file -- ntbtlog.txt or ntbootlog.txt, in C: or in C:\Windows. – Daniel R Hicks Nov 17 '11 at 01:12