odd Windows XP startup problem

My PC has been acting a little annoying lately. I first suspected Malware, so I've already been to the Malware removal portion of these forums, and the person who helped me could find no Malware on my system.

What's happening is odd. If I turn on my PC, and then leave it alone at the log-in screen without logging in, it takes awhile to be able to log in. What I mean is, I'll come back to the computer, move the mouse to turn off the default log-in screen screensaver, and the screen immediately clears and shows me the account names. But when I click on one, nothing happens. The password box doesn't pop up for about 3-5 minutes. Then I can type in the password and it loads up. But it takes longer than usual to load up the user account too. Once everything is loaded and I'm at the desktop, everything seems to run pretty good. I do get a little more hesitation, not much, in some of my games like Flight Simulator 2004 and Battlefield 2142, but they don't really run much worse than they used to.

Is my installation of Windows screwed up? It's really a minor annoyance at this point, but I'm just worried that since I don't know what's wrong, it may only get worse.

 

I assume that noone has any suggestions for me?

 

Give us a little detail about the pc.

Laptop? Desktop?
Age? Power settings?
Do you have Hibernate enabled?
What is the disk spin down time set to and what pc profile do you have set?

You will find this information by clicking power options in the control panel

 

It is a Gateway desktop running XP Media Center addition. It's about 1-1/2 years old. In the power options, I have it set as such:

Turn off monitor: never
Turn off hard disks: never
System standby: never
System hibernates: never

I don't see the disk spin down time and PC profile.

 

turn off hard disks = spin down time

OK so your problem is not to do with power settings.

Looking at your previous thread in malware I see you have Zone Alarm. The 2007 Internet Security suite has caused quite a bit of grief and would be my prime suspect.

Two things to do.

Firstly reproduce the problem and see what is running.
Get to the logon screen, wait for a while, then press ctrl+alt+delete once.
Look at task manager and record anything that is shown as running, both programs and services.

Turn off Zone Alarm and repeat.

Does the problem still happen?
Post the before and after list.

 

At the log-in screen, the Task Manager will not come up. CTRL + ALT + DELETE doesn't seem to do anything on this screen.

 

For security reasons, you're not supposed to be able to do anything at the login screen, save log in.

 

That makes sense. So how do I save my log in?

 

Probably the easiest way to setup an automatic login is to use the TweakUI powertoy from Microsoft.

http://img214.imageshack.us/img214/2892/autologonpf8.gif

This is the screen where we set it up.

 

Well, the problem does seem to be Zone Alarm Internet Security Suite version 7. I installed it on 7/30/07, and that's about how long ago my problems started. I guess I should have been able to put 2 and 2 together, but I just never suspected my security software. I've been using ZA's stuff for years with no problems. I wonder what they did to the new version to make it suck! I found countless complaints all over the web about this new version causing MAJOR performance problems.

If I turn ISS off and don't allow it to start at boot up, my PC runs great! I can log in to XP in about 1 minute or less. And everything runs really good. My mail download isn't getting hung up in Outlook anymore, I almost instantly see my homepage on IE7 versus waiting for 20-30 seconds for it to load. My games even seem to run better again.

So, I'm going back to Security Suite version 6 tonight. If that doesn't help, I'll ask them for a refund and go elsewhere for my security needs.