I suddenly started experiencing a long delay when I boot my Win XP Pro (SP2)
machine . It is a Dell 3.0 Gig cpu, 1 Gig memory machine.
For the past year, up until two days ago, it booted in about 1.5 minutes.
But the next and subsequent boots, it gets as far as showing the wallpaper
then hangs there for about 4 minutes. At this point there is nothing on the
screen except the wallpaper. At the end of the 4 minutes the taskbar and
desktop icons appear and the boot process continues normally. Once it has
completely booted everything appears to work normally.
I examined the Event Log and found only one oddity. Early in the boot
process --about the time the wallpaper appears -- the log records this: "The
Windows Image Acquisition (WIA) service hung on starting." 4 minutes later
the Event Log reports that the WIA service entered the running state.
The only recent system modifying events that I can recall are: 1) I
installed the latest JAVA runtime (JRE) from Sun. 2) Symantec's LiveUpdate
installed an updated LiveUpdate program. I have Symantec's WinFax Pro and
Norton Utilities, but not any of their anti-virus or firewall stuff.
I have seen references where there were problems with WIA and certain
scanner and printer drivers. However, my scanner and printer work fine
after the computer finally boots. Aslo, I have not updated any of their
drivers.
Does anyone have a suggestions how I might solve my slow boot problem?
- David Harper
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