Ok guys, I need your help with Windows XP services.

[tazzmissionx]

Here is the situation. I have a customers laptop that was in for general maintenance and some virus/spyware removal. It cleaned up nice and everything is running great except for one thing, it is taking an extended amount of time between the Welcome screen and before the first desktop item/icon appears.

Windows wallpaper will show along with the mouse icon during this process and once the first icon appears, everything pops up and loads just fine. After trial and error, a Microsoft service or services seems to be the culprit, none of the other services were causing this issue. Also to note that you can delete and restart the explorer process through Task Manager during the wait time and things pop right up.

Any idea/suggestions?

[chrispycrunch]

run ccleaner to clean up the registry. i am afraid that even if you disable some services, the bootup might still be slow. this might be a candidate for an xp re-install, if possible.

If not, then yeah, do a google search for "services windows xp disable"
you can get stop stuff like wireless (if not used), indexing services, and some of the remote ones.

are you running acrobat or antivirus? those can be heavy too depending on which ones.

[tazzmissionx]

Already cleaned up registry, as I was saying, when I disabled all Microsoft specific services from loading the issue does not exist.

[Demon10000]

Make sure there aren't any mapped drives that are trying to connect. Easiest way is to press ATL+TAB during the slowdown process -- if it's trying to map a drive, you'll see it.

If thats not the case, find a copy of bootvis and run that. It usually does a great job of speeding up XP startups.

[milkweg]

Did you use some anti-spyware prog that added entries to the Hosts file to block unwanted malware adware sites? If the Hosts file is over a certain size it will cause the behavior you describe and the fix is to disable the DNS Client service. Here's more info on it.

http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm

Editors Note: in most cases a large HOSTS file (over 135 kb) tends to slow down the machine. This only occurs in W2000/XP/Vista. Windows 98 and ME are not affected.

To resolve this issue (manually) open the "Services Editor"

* Start | Run (type) "services.msc" (no quotes)
* Scroll down to "DNS Client", Right-click and select: Properties
* Click the drop-down arrow for "Startup type"
* Select: Manual, or Disabled (recommended) click Apply/Ok and restart.

[Mithent]

Select: Manual, or Disabled (recommended) click Apply/Ok and restart.

Note that disabling the DNS Client service will mean that DNS entries are no longer cached, which may slow down Internet access as you'll be talking to the DNS server a lot more, plus the (very long, in this case) Hosts file has to be parsed by every program. I'd not personally be too concerned with blocking hosts since they change constantly, though?

[tazzmissionx]

Make sure there aren't any mapped drives that are trying to connect. Easiest way is to press ATL+TAB during the slowdown process -- if it's trying to map a drive, you'll see it.

If thats not the case, find a copy of bootvis and run that. It usually does a great job of speeding up XP startups.

Bootvis crashes when it tries to save the results, tried multiple times.

Did you use some anti-spyware prog that added entries to the Hosts file to block unwanted malware adware sites? If the Hosts file is over a certain size it will cause the behavior you describe and the fix is to disable the DNS Client service. Here's more info on it.

http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm

Editors Note: in most cases a large HOSTS file (over 135 kb) tends to slow down the machine. This only occurs in W2000/XP/Vista. Windows 98 and ME are not affected.

To resolve this issue (manually) open the "Services Editor"

* Start | Run (type) "services.msc" (no quotes)
* Scroll down to "DNS Client", Right-click and select: Properties
* Click the drop-down arrow for "Startup type"
* Select: Manual, or Disabled (recommended) click Apply/Ok and restart.

No luck. Did not do a thing for me.

[milkweg]

I've been using the Hosts file to block parasites for years and never noticed slower browsing because of it. If you read the url I posted it says it actually speeds up web browsing because it blocks a lot of ad servers. No ads = faster browsing. DNS caching is next to useless IMO.

[Joe Average]

I've been using the Hosts file to block parasites for years and never noticed slower browsing because of it. If you read the url I posted it says it actually speeds up web browsing because it blocks a lot of ad servers. No ads = faster browsing. DNS caching is next to useless IMO.


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Right?

[milkweg]

You have a nice day too BBZ_Ghost. :)

[Joe Average]

Thanks! We appreciate all your hard work...

[chrispycrunch]

to original poster: what is your boot up time? did you defrag?


Ok so what's the verdict on the DNS client services:
http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm

Does it speed up internet access?

[DigitalMP]

Just curious, how much are you charging this client for a spyware/virus clean?

I'll determine in 30-45 minutes if I'm going to spend the time on cleaning it, or backup & reformat.

I know it's the satisfaction of not letting something get the best of you, but it's typically not worth the time to chase trivial issues.

[tazzmissionx]

Update:

After many system restarts with certain Microsoft specific services loaded, I was able to single out the service that was causing the issue. It turned out that the Event Log service was causing this issue. I believe the Event Log service is responsible for the event viewer app so now I am trying to figure out what is wrong with event viewer that is causing this.

I thought that maybe the log files were too big so I cleared the log files but that did change anything.

[tazzmissionx]

to original poster: what is your boot up time? did you defrag?


Ok so what's the verdict on the DNS client services:
http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm

Does it speed up internet access?

Boot up time is fast. It's that there is an extended period of time from the welcome screen to the first item/icon that appears on the desktop, once something appears on the desktop than everything else loads in a snap.

Just curious, how much are you charging this client for a spyware/virus clean?

I'll determine in 30-45 minutes if I'm going to spend the time on cleaning it, or backup & reformat.

I know it's the satisfaction of not letting something get the best of you, but it's typically not worth the time to chase trivial issues.

I charge $45/hr for service in general, it might be trivial but this delay adds 2min 20 sec on the load time and would irritate anybody.

[tazzmissionx]

Final update:

Clearing event viewer logs and reconfiguring their max size and when to write did not change things so I changed the service from automatic to manual and fixes the loading delay.

Sure, there will be no logs, but if I have to work on it again in the future I can start it if I need to and reproduce the errors to get them to show in the log if needed.