XP "Welcome" Hangs for 3 Minutes

I've had lots of trouble with my Windows installs on my Boot Camp partitions. With Vista, I've had to reformat pretty much a couple months after the first install, every time. It would eventually just stop loading the desktop. This is not the point of my post though. I am currently running XP, which I prefer to Vista. My problem now is the same as the first time I tried Boot Camp and installed XP (and found no solution to, hence the Vista option). XP takes FOREVER to load. After it's started it runs great. Takes only seconds to load from the partition selection screen to the Windows loading screen. Windows loading has a reasonable time (10ish seconds?). Then the blue "Welcome" screen shows up along with the standard sound. This Welcome screen takes up to 3 minutes to go away to finally show the desktop. I know people are having larger problems than I, but I have to restart into XP many almost every day and this is just way too long to have to wait when XP starts in a reasonable amount of time on any PC. Some observations: Before installing all of the necessary Windows Updates, this was not a problem, so I wonder if it is a driver issue. Also, even with all of the Windows Updates installed, booting the partition in Fusion, the boot time is not a problem at all, which I find strange.

Does anyone have any ideas what this could be? Is there a way I can check if XP is getting hung up on a driver?

24" iMac Intel Core 2 Duo 3.06ghz 4gb
Snow Leopard 10.6.3

Windows XP Pro SP3

Thanks,

Sean

I don't think it's getting hung up on a driver. That would probably cause Windows to crash.

More than likely you have something that's starting when Windows boots and is holding up the loading of the desktop. The culprit could very well be your Anti Virus software. Check your AV software and make sure you have not selected the option to "scan the system" when it starts. If that's turned on, it will not load the desktop until the scan is finished. Change it to "manual".

If that's not it, post back and we'll try something else.

Regards.

Thank you for the reply. My virus scan is Microsoft Security Essentials. I did not see an option to enable (or disable) a startup scan. I've also had this problem in the past when I was not using MSE, but McAfee. Again, there is no unreasonable wait when I start my Boot Camp partition in Fusion... Why would it be different in a virtual machine than a real machine?

Thank you,

Sean

For one, the VM is not using Windows drivers. It uses its own supplied drivers by installing "guest tools". And since the VM is already running, it takes very little time to boot Windows.

Since you're using MSE, that can't be the problem. I also use MSE and my Windows 7 boots in less than 30 seconds.

Open up the configuration editor (System Configuration from the Start menu) and select the startup tab. Take a look and see what's starting. Something there may be delaying the boot.

Also - do you have any external devices attached; hard drive, DVD, camera, music, etc ? Any of those will delay the startup.

From Administrative Tools, open the Event Viewer and look for errors.

Let us know.

Regards.

Interesting stuff on VM. Didn't know it should be faster. I Googled every file that loads in the System Configuration's Startup tab. I unchecked a few things that looked unnecessary, but I still have the same problem. I have nothing attached to my iMac save for my mouse and keyboard. There are some interesting things in the "System" option of the Event Viewer. Pretty consistently listed are the same four flags, 2 Errors and 2 Warnings. The dates on them seem almost a day off (into the future?) though, so I'm not sure if they are from the startup or just random things that happen in the background.

Warnings:
"BTHUSB: Windows cannot store Bluetooth link keys on the local transceiver because it cannot determine whether proper security is enabled for the device."
"vmdebug: VMDebug driver (version 7.3.4.3) was not enabled. This driver is required by the replay debugging feature of VMware Workstation. If you are using other VMware products or not using replay debugging, please ignore this message."

Errors:
"acpi: ACPI: ACPI BIOS is attempting to write to an illegal PCI Operation Region (0x41c), Please contact your system vendor for technical assistance."
"Service Control Manager: The Parallel port driver service failed to start due to the following error: The service cannot be started, either because it is disabled or because it has no enabled devices associated with it."

I assume the "vmdebug" thing isn't the issue as this problem started happening even before I owned Fusion.

Any ideas?

Thanks