Monday morning surprise

I came into the office this morning to find my computer (Toshiba Portege, M700) in a state that seemed to be hung up in the midst of a windows update reboot. So I waited for a while, and nothing happened. The last normal reboot seems to have taken place sometime prior to about 3am Central time Sunday morning, when a Windows update was done (so it seems from Event Viewer). After that time, there are a large number of DCOM errors - things like WSearch failing to start, etc.

A half hour later, tired of waiting, I decided to hard reset. Once I did that, the machine has yet to come up to a running state outside of safe mode.

Among the things (I didn't catalog each and every reboot, etc.) tried were reboots into normal mode with just about every non-essential piece of software disabled, uninstallation of Sophos antivirus and Adobe Acrobat Pro and other biggies, etc. Never did I get a "normal mode" reboot to work. I've also restored the system to several set points prior to the weekend, to no avail.

I will post some event viewer text when I have the chance tomorrow, but I'm totally dead in the water. I'm posting this note just in case this happened to anyone else this weekend or at their last Windows Update.

Also, if there's information that is helpful (I'm new to Vista) for me to post please let me know. Thanks.


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Todd Pedlar
Asst. Prof. of Physics
Luther College
Decorah, IA 52101

Check out this thread
Vista Boot Up Problem
Do some of the things that other people recomended

You might try uninstalling the last Update that was installed and seeing if that will allow the machine to go back to its former state - and speaking of former states, since it was an update, there should have been a restore point made right before the installation began - so you could try restoring to that time as well.

I just found out what the update was. Service Pack 1, which was updated at 3am Sunday morning, and after which my machine never came up.

I found this out because I rebooted my machine just before leaving work yesterday - and then entering my password at the login screen - and then leaving.

What appears to have been happening after I enter my password is a black screen (that I took to be inactivity or 'looping') which was just a tremendously long login process. I hope that's not going to be the case always because I can't deal with an hours-long login every time I reboot. We'll see how it goes today but the machine seems great. Sad, though, that it's a Service Pack update that seems to have caused this. I *knew* I didn't want Vista.

Well, here we go again. Windows explorer crashed several times in the middle of what seemed to be an operational state. Forced to reboot, the computer resumed its ill state. This is extremely frustrating.

Thanks for the pointers to the other vista boot problems, but the symptoms described there are nothing like mine. The machine does not crash at any time - just seems to freeze up.

two words..reformat..reinstall

Works for me

Possibly try a system restore to the point when your computer was working. Because of the updates downloaded it might be one of those.
System Restore - How to

if that system restore did not work or has consequences you can undo it here:
System Restore - undo

I hope this gets you on the right track, and helps.

I did several restores yesterday, and none seemed to make any difference. But, upon coming in this morning I saw that the system, which worked for a couple hours until Windows Explorer crapped out (sending me into oblivion again) had just done a windows update.

So I tried just now doing a system restore to the point of that windows update. The computer came up, and let me enter my password. Now it's been switting on the "welcome" screen for about a half hour. I'm about to give up. This is REALLY painful (and I need this machine badly for teaching)

Yeah classes start really soon, I hope you have your syllabus available. You should see the campus IT guy and see if he has any advice for you. Take a look at a few options:
Clean Install with a Full Version of Vista
Repair Install For Vista
Startup Repair

this is precisely why I have never let any version of windows do the Updates automatically. I prefer to run it manually every 2 weeks or so.