"Windows XP is starting up" is taking too long

[lemmy999]

I recently installed a new mother board (ASROCK 939Dual-VSTA) and processor (AMD 64 3700+ San Diego) and everything is running pretty well. The only problem I have is that the splash screen just before I am prompted to log on that says "windows xp is starting up" (or something similar) stays up for about 2 minutes or more. Every other stage of the boot process is fairly quick. I am running a new install of Windows XP Pro (no service pack yet). I have tried clearing out the prefetch directory and this didn't help at all. Is there any way I can find out what is taking so long? Thanks.

[ktkendall]

If you do the F8 thing right before the splash screen, and and choose boot with text logging you'll see what it is.
Do you have any network connectons with nothing actually connected?? That takes long because they are trying to connect and find dhcp and can not then finally time out.

[lemmy999]

Thanks, I will try the text logging. I had done that before, but it was a long time ago and I had forgotten how to get XP to do that.

I have one wireless NIC and one regular NIC. The wirless one has a good connection and the wired one is unplugged. But there are no applications or mapped network drives that would be trying to use those connections while starting XP. BTW, I am not on a domain with this computer, just a workgroup.

[glc]

Disable the wired NIC in device manager.

[ktkendall]

Yes you are correct, but the wired one is waiting to establish a connection, and get an IP via dhcp as long as it is enabled. Do as GLC suggests and see if boot time does not speed up signifigantly..

[lemmy999]

I disabled the wired NIC and ran regclean. It is definitely faster now, but still very slow (like 1+ minute instead of 2). I enabled bootlogging and there are several loaded drivers but these are drivers that did not load:

Did not load driver \SystemRoot\System32\DRIVERS\mssmbios.sys
Did not load driver \SystemRoot\System32\Drivers\NDProxy.SYS
Did not load driver \SystemRoot\System32\Drivers\NDProxy.SYS
Did not load driver \SystemRoot\System32\Drivers\lbrtfdc.SYS
Did not load driver \SystemRoot\System32\Drivers\Sfloppy.SYS
Did not load driver \SystemRoot\System32\Drivers\i2omgmt.SYS
Did not load driver \SystemRoot\System32\Drivers\Changer.SYS
Did not load driver \SystemRoot\System32\Drivers\Cdaudio.SYS
Did not load driver \SystemRoot\System32\DRIVERS\processr.sys
Did not load driver \SystemRoot\System32\Drivers\PCIDump.SYS
Did not load driver \SystemRoot\System32\DRIVERS\rdbss.sys
Did not load driver \SystemRoot\System32\DRIVERS\mrxsmb.sys

Some of these are listed as loaded, then also listed at not loaded. I have no idea why some are not loading and some are attempting to be loaded twice. I have looked for the files and some of them are present, but others are not.

[lemmy999]

I finally fixed the problem. I noticed that mssmbios.sys is a file associated with SP2. I didn't think I had installed SP2 on this machine, but I guess I had. Then when I did the repair install (when I changed motherboard and CPU) I had no SP. I think the slow boot problem was caused by some remnants of SP2 services that were trying to start. I installed SP2 and the bootup is very fast now. Thanks.