XP hangs at "Loading Your Personal Settings"

I have two different type Dell machines in two different locations,
with no interface between the two, having the same problem that
started on or about June 20th. When I boot, the systems freeze at
'Loading Your Personal Settings'. I've let them sit for hours but
never proceed past that point. They're just dead in the water.

Both are running XP Pro SP2, running the same malware protection
(Corporate Sysmantec AV, Windows Defender and AVG), both are on a
router, and neither require login. Also, both allow me to remote in
and one is networked to another PC. They are two years apart in age.

I can get in via Safe Mode and have disabled everything in Startup
under msconfig but the systems still hang. I tried 'Last Known Good
Configuration' but that didn't work. I tried using earlier restore
points but no luck there. All virus scans come up clean. I even
spoke with Dell Gold Support and tried a few things with them but
nothing worked and the call is still open. Their suggestion was to
restore my Acronis backup mirror images but I'm not willing to give up
that easily.

The only reasonable conclusion I can see is that they both downloaded
some update that caused the problem because why would two unrelated
machines be having the same problem at the same time?

Can anyone give me any ideas as to possible problems? Even knowing
where to look would be a start. And, as you can tell, I'm non-tech
but know enough not to start changing settings without knowing what
I'm doing (i.e. I know just enough to be paranoid)!

[luigi713]

If you can get in to an admin level account in Safe Mode, create a new
account and try logging into that in regular mode. If you can get in,
consider that the old profile may be corrupt, and migrate the settings and
documents to the new account.

Is your Pagefile too small or have no Pagefile? If it is then read the
following KB article.

Error Message: Your System Has No Paging File, or the Paging File Is
Too Small
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315270

Other Possibility:

Windows XP Welcome Screen Appears to Stop Responding (Hang) During Logon
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/816873

[Saldric]

Did you ever find a resolution to this issue?

I am having the same problem on an HP Desktop running Windows XP Home.

The PC gets to the Welcome screen and then to "Loading your personal settings..." and then hangs. All HDD activity ceases (or at least the light stops blinking).

The PC will boot OK in safe mode, with or without networking.

I have tried:
- Turning off all startup entries (using Autoruns), same behavior
- Logging in using another profile, same behavior
- Using System Restore, going back as far as 4-5 restore points, same behavior
- Turning off the welcome screen and Autologin, the machine then hangs as soon as I try to log in. (with no error message)

I'm still running some virus/malware scans under ubcd4win, but have found nothing so far.

Any suggestions?

I did try using a different user account, though I did not create a new account. After much hair-pulling and intensive web-searching (thanks, Google!) I found an obscure reference to this problem occurring when some part (no idea which) of AVG antivirus (or in this case AVG antimalware) becomes corrupted.

Uninstalling and reinstalling AVG from Safe Mode fixed everything.

It was an easy fix, but figuring it out was totally mind-bending.

[nko321]

Not to revive an ancient thread but since this is what came up several times in my Googling, I thought I'd post the solution that worked for me:

My exact symptomology was that, when logging in, I'd get stuck at the light-blue screen / "Loading your personal settings" window. Pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del, I was able to pull up the Task Manager. I went to File -> Run and started a shell prompt ("cmd").

I ran the command "sfc /scannow". This command verifies system files against those on a Windows CD (so yes, you'll need a Windows CD). When it finds a corrupt file, the file is replaced. After this command finished running, I had my full XP desktop waiting for me.

[swat253]

I a experiencing all the symptoms of hanging at "loading your..." also.

System Restore did not work, logging in with the other user accts did not work, waiting for CHKDSK to finish so I can try nko's fix above...

From searching for solutions to this problem, I found posts as far back as 2003. You'd think MS would have already created a downloadable utility to address this aggravating bug!

It seems I have solved the issue for the time being...

I ran a full virus scan (avast!) from safe mode and found 3 instances of corrupt files WITHIN MY AVAST SOFTWARE among others corrupt files that should have been detected long before the full scan. Figuring my AVS was one of the first programs to load, I deleted my "avast!" software and logged right in on the first attempt...

I have used "avast!" for several months without any issues, and it has worked better than many of the big names. I'm currently running a trial version of Kaspersky while I wait and see if any of my other PCs runnig avast! develop the "loading your personal settings" issue. I'm not giving up on avast!, but I am wondering how an antivirus program downloads a trojan during daily software updates...

Using somebody else's thread made it appear that you were answering a
question and that may account for nobody replying. And, this is a very
busy site.

Install it on your machine and give that drive another scan. I worked on a
PC this weekend that had the same symptoms and after removing 400+
infections, it worked fine.

[Kerig]

Today my laptop gave me the hang-up at "loading personal settings" as mentioned in this thread.

After rebooting in safe mode (F8 tap tap tap) I simply uninstalled Avast Anti-Virus, rebooted, and everything seems fine now.

Upon googling other lengthy solutions before finding this simple/perfect one, I noticed people were getting stuck screens with other AV programs, so I don't really know who's to blame at this point.

I think I'll wait a few weeks before reinstalling Avast. I like how it runs silently without much intrusion, but like others have said: how can I trust an AV program that does this to me? First AVG 8.0 practically destroying itself and my system restore points in the process, now this?

My personal observations when it was stuck that hasn't been mentioned yet:

1. Every time it would load to the personal settings screen, I would hear Avast give the woop woop virus warning.

2. I could not access task manager at all when it would get stuck (mouse cursor would still move)

My solution was to press Ctrl + Alt + Del at the screen. You bring up the task manager then start ending processes.

I'd suggest that someone has developed a method of clumsily disabling A/V
programs that's causing some hangs.

Very recently I removed some malware that had silently removed the installed
antivirus, and left behind its program folders - empty. It did this under
the guise of being an "ultimate" antivirus solution, in reality its purpose
is to harvest credit cards.

Are you sure it's the AV program doing this? It sounds a lot like Avast
has been telling you the system is infected.

Since the malware is apparently active when you boot, and it's apparently
interfering with antivirus software, you have to make and end run.

Remove the drive from your laptop and attach it to another XP system with
up-to-date antivirus. Attach using a USB2 case or adapter. Now, scan the
drive with the host A/V program. Do as thorough a scan as possible.

Locate all of the temp and temporary interet files folders and empty them.
Clear the wastebasket.

And you responded to this, how? This is, after all, a pretty clear
indication of a serious problem.

Unfortunately disabling protection likely won't make you or it happy for
very long.

[therende@capecod.net]

Had same problem today with an XP SP2 system after Symantec Endpoint Protection was updated.
Safe mode would crash system...
Booted to repair console, ran fixboot, fixmbr and chkdsk; was then able to boot to safe mode. CWShredder picked up CWS.MSCONFIG.; still couldn't boot normally. Created a new admin account, no help.
Installed SP3 in safe mode and voila', back in business, finally!

[KCvale]

XP Pro desktop box with Norton Antivirus
The guy was cruising along and Norton popped up with a message saying it found a threat (background scan I would guess, but it could have been live).

He clicked to "remove threat", Norton said it did and that he should re-boot.

He did, and now when it gets to the "loading personal settings" and it starts the login music it goes into an endless loop.

It has the "loading personal settings" box, then it flashes a another pop-up and goes back to "loading personal settings" and restarts the login jingle.

This happens in every mode including Safe Mode.
No Alt-Ctrl-Del to see whats running, no window functions at all.

I did an XP Re-Install/Repair and the problem is still there, so I assume his profile is pooched, most likely do to the Norton repair.

Now here is the hard part...
I disabled the login screen via:

1.Click Start and Run
2.Type "Control Userpasswords2" and press enter.
3.Uncheck the box for "Users must enter a user name and password to use this computer."
4.Click Apply and Ok.

That means I can't select another user, nor can I create one.

I pulled the drive and put it on my machine, ran the normal scans (anti-virus, spybot S&D, Ad-Aware) and found nothing of consequence so I figure I need to either find the file to edit the "show/Don't show" login screen so I can give another login a try with another user, or edit the default users "startup programs" file and remove everything but the basics.

After 20 years you'd think I'd know how to do this at the drive level but I don't.
It's tricky because the machine itself won't come up to any function.
Anyone know what files on his drive I need to edit to give it another try?

That makes sense. I do that on my own sites from time to time.
I just figured it was related so I resurrected an old topic ;-}

The machine in question was running updated Norton in background and warned of a threat, he clicked to remove it, and now as soon as Personal Settings load on startup it goes to Logging Off.

I scanned the drive on my box with McAfee, Spybot S&D, and AdAware and found nothing of consequence and the problem remains.

I'm going to load Norton 2007 on my box and scan it with that, but in the mean time, any ideas what I can edit on the customer drive hooked to my box to change the user?

My Norton is XP and my current box is Vista so I loaded AVG (newest)
It found these on customers drive and removed them:

"F:\Program Files\Ares\Ares.exe";"Trojan horse SHeur.BUVB"
"F:\WINDOWS\system32\svchostw.exe";"Trojan horse Generic13.AAU"

Still no go.

[Infrin]

Just to let you know, I work in an Active Directory environment and we receive this error all the time. The only similarities that we have that has been posted on this in the past is that we have Symantec Endpoint Protection. The way we resolve this is by logging in as the local administrator. We have tried other various methods (that might sometimes work) like gpupdate /force /boot but most of the time just logging in as local administrator works the best.

[TeeEss]

Whoo-Hoo! SUCCESS! Nothing worked for me until I did the following:
Boot into Safe Mode (F8 before Welcome freezing)
Start > Run, type msconfig
I turned off everything and could then boot up. By turning services on 8 at a time I found my culprit. I'll tell you the short answer in case you don't want to go through all that.
UNCHECK Plug and Play!
If that doesn't work for you, you may have to do it the longer way to find the corrupted file. I was able to turn on Normal Startup (under General tab) then just disable Plug and Play once again. It appears to be the lone gunman.
Good luck.

[MarjanT]

Same symptoms - user logs in, comp freezes at 'loading personal settings'.

Keyboard num lock and caps lock respond (led lights change). Mouse moves pointer. No other response (ctrl-alt-del etc.)

I get normal ping response, and computer responds well to compmgmt.msc connect to remote computer. No relevant looking info in log files.

Background
Info in this thread hinted for corrupt programs (usually AV, that get updated all the time) as a reason.
So I extrapolated corrupt programs and their updates generally (windows automatic updates as a most probable culprit).
Corrupt AV software was less probable, because Sophos probably had problems with corruption when updating sometime in stone age and I suppose currently checks download accuracy with at least three checksum types. If there is an AV updating problem, it just doesn't update and you get a notification about it (both on target machine and on managemend data base).

Actions and effects
I try to stop automatic update service, and after half a minute or more get response it cannot be stopped. Same trying to stop main AV service. When I try to stop AV reporting service, it stops and when requested starts again normally. I disconnect compmgmt.msc from comp in question.

I request shutdown -f -r -m=_machine_ and request seem to be accepted. The syslog entry from USER32 says

The process winlogon.exe has initiated the restart of _machine_ for the following reason: No title for this reason could be found
Minor Reason: 0xff
Shutdown Type: reboot
Comment:

Machine stayed locally unresponsive, so I powered it of by long press on on/off button.

I started the machine into Recovery console and requested chkdsk /p /f for partition with startup files, and the partition with operating system. Both commands reported extended checking or recovery.

I didn't request to check the user data partition at the time (it is large, would run a long time, to be scheduled to run after work hours, and is much less often corrupt)

After restarting from rec console into windows and log in as admin type user no non-response problem was detected.

Event log entry from check for partition with operating system reported a lot of repairs (often repaired wrong which by experience mean a lot of files effectively lost or corrupt). I recall no info on bad blocks, so physically the disk is probably OK.

After log in into user account it is normally responsive. User does most of her work in MS Office (i think 2003), so started word, excell, access and outlook and all responded fast without detected problems.

Because I suppose some files were damaged or missing, and to be on safe side if they were part of office installation I requested detect and repair (I think from MS Word help submenu).

It reported to be successfully completed, and user found no problems up to now.

But I see about 12 of new type (for this machine) DCOM errors in about 2 minutes, supposedely starting with the time when repair was requested.

The log entry message is

The application-specific permission settings do not grant Local Activation permission for the COM Server application with CLSID
{B20E899D-B079-479D-A4DC-10F758D9CD9A}
to the user _domain_\_user_ SID (S-9-9-99-9999999999-9999999999-9999999999-9999999999-9999) . This security permission can be modified using the Component Services administrative tool.
(actual SID numbers different)

I suppose several objects reported fixed by chkdsk were actually left corrupt or missing. So I have direct hanging problem at user settings probably solved (by a solution not before described here), and am having to go search for DCOM problem/solution info.

Conclusion
Generally, whoever has a fast program partition restauration solution it would probably time to use it, than apply updates to anything that needs updating, with emphasys on AV SW first.

[lcjqjo44]

I experienced this same issue of XP hanging at the windows logon prompt .

Read all the posts above

- Disabled the XP Welcome screen and switched to CLassic Login.
- UnInstalled AVG and my 'Paid' AVAST version in Safe Mode
- Disabled almost all the programs in Startup .
- Rebooted
- Everything was back to normal.
- Re-installed AVAST . Encountered the exact same problem of inexplicable hanging.
- So finally & reluctantly go rid of AVAST for the second time
- Have installed MS Security Essentials now
- XP is working just fine as though nothing had happened.
Hard to believe that AVAST caused this . I had not customized/tampered with AVAST default settings and its working fine on my other laptops ( fingers crossed !!)

[kjvw10]

I brought the machine up in safe mode. I uninstalled Symantec antivirus using the tools I found at symantec because you cannot uninstall in safe mode without it. The machine got fast as a rabbit. Did the windoze update that was required. Ran windows update manually after to insure all updates were done. Then I re-installed symantec antivirus. The machine works fine now.... Only 5 more to go luckily small office with small network for me. If I had to do this with like 250 machines I'd make a new image and push it out to all the other machines using either Ghost or Acronis. This just seems to be a problem when you run Symantec pushing it out from the server or in certain cases. I don't see this on every machine I work on could be the combination of the Windoze update and the version of Symantec or it's update of virus update files. I run Symantec on a few of my other machines at home and don't see this. Wonder if it has to do with the fact that while they are networked they but are not sharing resources from the server. I usually only see it in the networked, shared resources, Active directory enviroment. I don't see this when the Server is using any other operating system either such as a Linux based server. Hmmmmmmm..... Microsoft at it's best? no idea. But it does tend to be the Microsoft updates that are doing the dirty work.

[topkat690]

I don't know if this thread is still open but I am having the same problem except mine hangs up going into safe mode and I cannot use my keyboard or mouse, sometimes it goes to the desk top and then hangs up after most of the icons loaded and the task bar does not load I recently moved my computer and disconnected my modem so I am not connected to the internet right now I am using my net book on a friends wireless, I am running windows xp on that pc I have all the recent updates. what I don't know is if the person that moved it sat down hard.