Extremely Slow XP Login for no reason?

Hello. I have a new core2duo machine with windows xp. It takes around 60 seconds to log in and I can't figure out why. I disabled all start up programs and all non-microsoft services. I also did a virus scan and a HD defrag. After that I even ran hardware tests. All the hardware is in good condition. I don't understand what is slowing down this machine. Could some one give me a hand please? Thanks!

 

Goto http://www.superantispyware.com/ and download their free spyware remover it might help...

 

Thanks, but that doesn't help. Any other suggestions?

 

Other computers on your network? Have you mapped drives? Workgroup or Server based network?

The pause you describe could be related to mapped drives and attempts to connect to remove network resources.

 

Firstly, what is the specific make and model of the computer in question? It's possible that there is a model-specific issue with XP that could be quickly spotted if we knew the make and model.

Secondly, has the system always had this lag, at least since you installed XP on it? If so, it might be related to a driver problem since a lot of the new systems being released have spotty driver coverage for XP (they were designed for, and intended to be used with, _Vista, after all ). To verify that it's not just a simple driver problem, look in the device manager to see if any of the devices on the system (both physical and logical) are flagged with a yellow exclamation mark. If any is, check it out.

Also, did you check in your event logs to see if anything got logged during startup that might have taken a lot of time, such as a non-essential driver timing out because it failed to respond in the alloted time?

lastly, you can enable bootlogging so that you can get a detailed log of what's being loaded, and what's not being loaded, during boot. In XP you enable bootlogging by adding a switch to the line in your boot.ini that specifies the OS to boot. A how-to can be found here.

Also, Microsoft's TechNet has a more comprehensive article on Troubleshooting the Startup Process that might give you some more help on what you should be looking for.

 

Yes I have other computers on the network. No I do not have mapped drives. Workgroup based.

1) Thinkpad T61

2) Issue happened over time of use.

3) All items in device manager are fine.

4) Check Event Viewer

This error shows up 3 times:

WAM Service failed to start due to the following error: The specified driver is invalid.

25 Warnings include:

Your computer was not able to renew its address from the network for the network card. Your computer will continue to try and obtain an address on its own from the network address server. Source: DHCP

A request to suspend power was denied by winlogon.exe

Gigabit Network Connection Link has been disconnected

(I don't know which of these errors has to do with logon, so thats were I need help than)

NOTE: I did try disabling all network interfaces to see if the issue would be fixed after rebooting. No Change.

Thanks again!

 

Well I uninstalled the network device that was causing part of the problem. The second is: WAM Service failed to start due to the following error: The specified driver is invalid.

I don't know what to do. In the services window there is no service called WAM. Also google doesn't turn up much for this service. Help?! Thanks.

 

The gigabyte network connection being disabled I would not worry about, unless you're trying to use a wired ethernet connection - if you're using the wireless, then the wired ethernet connection will show up as being disabled. For example, if you open a cmd console window and run "ipconfig /all" you should see the statement for the wired connection "Media disconnected" which basically just means that the computer is not using the wired connection since it's in fact using the wireless connection.

The 25 events relating to the computer's inability to renew its IP address from the network could be a source of the delays you're experiencing if the computer has that problem on bootup. When the computer is "listening" to the NIC, it typically blocks on that process until it either receives the data it's looking for, or the process times out. If the computer is trying to contact the wireless network to obtain an IP address (and related data, such as the default gateway and etc), but isn't getting an answer, a lot of other processes would basically be stalled until the process doing the "listening" times out. Furthermore, if the system reattempts to connect to the network to get its IP information too frequently, you could be getting multiple blocks during a single logon process, which would cause the logon process to take much more time than it should.

Unfortunately, if that's the case, it could be either a problem with your router, or a problem with your computer. Have you had any other problems that you know you can trace to the router, such as when using different computers?

Where there any Event ID numbers, or other error codes, in the event log entries for the DHCP failures?

The WAM Service failures are curious, because a quick google doesn't pinpoint the culprit (largely because WAM is a very common acronym for a whole bunch of different concepts). To better identify what this is, see if there were any Event IDs or other error codes contained in the relevant event log entries.

EDIT: It would actually help if you could cut and paste into a post the exact text from the two event log entries, instead of trying to summarize what they said.

 

Thanks guys for all the suggestions. What fixed the issue in the end was:

1) Uninstalling Sonic Wall. That was the DHCP error. (I don't use Sonic Wall anyway)

2) The WAM service was driving me crazy after tons of research I found out it was the Lenovo Think Center software. I uninstall that as I don't use it either.

Now my log in is perfect and the computer boots in 45 seconds. Improvement from 3:08!!

 

Sounds good; congratulations!

 

Thanks Shyster this was driving me crazy.

 

.Windows has a bad habit of doing that, doesn't it? On the other hand, it's immensely satisfying when you manage to sort something like that out, almost like you managed to "beat" .Windows at its own game.