Lately I've been having problems sometimes when I actually get into my Win XP (Home) at the end of the bootup process. I've read a lot people have problems with black screens during booting, but this is when I'm looking at the desktop, all the icons are loaded, and the system tray icons are all loaded in and all their connected little splash screens display and go away.
It's at this point where my problem begins. For some reason after everything seems fully loaded, I go to open any program, even Windows Explorer, and I see the mouse cursor change to the "working in background" cursor for a couple seconds. Then it changes back to normal and nothing else happens. I try to open anything else, and get the same delay, including a few second delay when I have sound events assigned for "menu pop up" or "menu command." It's like the system boots normally, but then I can't do anything with it. And I've let it sit for at least 5 to 10 minutes.
As far as I can remember, I have changed nothing on the system that would account for a problem. About all I've changed are the monitor and keyboard, and I was experiencing this problem with the old monitor and keyboard attached as well.
I'm using Windows XP Home on a Pentium4 1.7 GHz, PChips 920LR motherboard, 512 MB of PC133 SDRAM, a Maxtor 60 GB and a Maxtor 30 GB (roughly) hard drive, a GeForce4 MX 440 video card with 128 MB VRAM and DX9 installed, a Creative Labs Audigy, a RealTek PCI Fast Ethernet NIC, and a 60x (if I remember right) DVD-ROM drive. I think that covers it all.
This problem starting happening a few months ago, and seems to only occur when the computer is prevented from normal operations, like a power outtage or some kind of game crash and lockup that forces a manual reboot. It works fine after a random number of reboots, all using normal bootup (rather than safe mode or the like). Using Safe Mode to start up doesn't seem to help either.
Any help would be greatly appreciated, as this problem has me very confounded. I've been searching the site here (and others, using Google searches) for anything like this, but as far as I can tell this is pretty unique.
~MV
It's at this point where my problem begins. For some reason after everything seems fully loaded, I go to open any program, even Windows Explorer, and I see the mouse cursor change to the "working in background" cursor for a couple seconds. Then it changes back to normal and nothing else happens. I try to open anything else, and get the same delay, including a few second delay when I have sound events assigned for "menu pop up" or "menu command." It's like the system boots normally, but then I can't do anything with it. And I've let it sit for at least 5 to 10 minutes.
As far as I can remember, I have changed nothing on the system that would account for a problem. About all I've changed are the monitor and keyboard, and I was experiencing this problem with the old monitor and keyboard attached as well.
I'm using Windows XP Home on a Pentium4 1.7 GHz, PChips 920LR motherboard, 512 MB of PC133 SDRAM, a Maxtor 60 GB and a Maxtor 30 GB (roughly) hard drive, a GeForce4 MX 440 video card with 128 MB VRAM and DX9 installed, a Creative Labs Audigy, a RealTek PCI Fast Ethernet NIC, and a 60x (if I remember right) DVD-ROM drive. I think that covers it all.
This problem starting happening a few months ago, and seems to only occur when the computer is prevented from normal operations, like a power outtage or some kind of game crash and lockup that forces a manual reboot. It works fine after a random number of reboots, all using normal bootup (rather than safe mode or the like). Using Safe Mode to start up doesn't seem to help either.
Any help would be greatly appreciated, as this problem has me very confounded. I've been searching the site here (and others, using Google searches) for anything like this, but as far as I can tell this is pretty unique.
~MV