Vista - Vista Startup/Desktop Problems

Hi guys,

Whenever I try to load vista it seems to be loading fine, but will stop once the icons start filling the taskbar. Sometimes I can try and run a program, but the start bar will freeze and the program will not load, however most of the time it will just freeze before this. It's taking a really long time to even get onto the desktop screen as well.

The computer loads fine in Safe Mode (which is where I am typing this from).

I have tried startup repair and it says there are no errors, tried to do a bootlog but I don't know where Windows writes the file to(although from a quick search, it appears it's not much use anyway) and I've tried system restore which completed correctly, but did not solve my problem.

I actually had this problem a little while ago, and had to reinstall my system from the Dell backup, however I've just moved into digs at Uni and of course all the stuff I would want to reinstall is at home, not to forget that it takes so long.

Spec is: Dell Studio 1555 Laptop, Dual Core T4200 Processor @ 2GHz, 4GB RAM, 512MB ATI mobility Radeon HD 4570, running Vista Home Premium 64Bit on SP2.

Can anybody shed any light on the situation? Many thanks.

since it loads in safe mode might be as simple as a video driver. can you goto start> search>type device manager> look for video and display devices. are there yellow triangles on either, or is either missing? are there any "unkown devices" with yellow triangles on them?

thanks

ken

Thanks for the reply.

Is Display adapters the menu you were referring to?

In safe mode, it said the GFX card was disabled, so I rebooted into Diagnostic startup. In this mode it says everything is working fine. Of couse the driver is probably way out of date compared to the offical ATI Drivers, because Dell rarely release a new one. I had a quick look through everything else and can't see any yellow flags.

I have ran the "sfc /scannow" thingy, but I can't make any sense of it. It said there were errors, but it could not fix them. I can't remeber if it actually managed to fix any of the errors. If it would help, I can upload the log somewhere.

I ran malware bytes, firstly with a quick scan which found one virus (the name escapes me), but I got rid of that. Did a full scan, and it says everything is clear.

Could it perhaps be something loading up in startup? I havent installed anything new to make this happen, in fact the computer was working perfectly fine this morning which is why it's annoying. It's started to take quite a while to even boot into the state where it freezes now, and the screen is black with the vista egg timer. Slowly things will start to appear.

you can type msconfig and uncheck some startup. Be VERY VERY careful. Do NOT uncheck ANY Microsoft startup items unless you are very sure what you are doing.

Next, if it comes up correctly, uncheck on item at a time to find the culprit.

Okay, well I unchecked everything from startup but it made no difference. What about services? Can I uncheck things from there?

First re-enable all startup.

When going to services, HIDE all Microsoft Services. You can then sort by STATUS, as we are only interested in RUNNING processes. ONLY uncheck items you are abolutely, positively sure of what they do. Like I could uncheck Markvision b/c I know what that does and it will not have an impact on starting up. When in doubt, don't take a chance.

Okay, a bit of progress. Thank you =D. I disabled pretty much everything which I knew what it was/could easily find in Google, and it has booted okay this time.


There is one more in the menu, which is the Dell Wireless Wlan Tray Service

These are the services, I have running at the moment. Would you be able to suggest any that are more likely to be the problem than the others?

Im hoping that this isn't just a one off, because when the problem happened before, sometimes it would boot perfectly.

Edit: Okay, I'm pretty sure I've narrowed it down to the comodo service.

Many thanks for your help guys, you've saved me an awful lot of time and effort .

Great! Good luck to you.

Stardock apps can also cause problems. Just a heads up.

Okay, just for future reference for anyone else suffering the same problem.

Workaround for the 99% CPU Problem with the latest Virus DB Updates

Seems that some of the updates caused the CPU usage to be around 100%, but after a reinstall everything seems to be fine *touchwood*.