moved from xp]Help me troubleshoot 'Loading settings' hang on startup

[kylezo]

Hello everyone,

I just had a peculiar issue start with my computer. When I start it up, it hangs for 5 minutes or more at "Loading your personal settings". Well, Google is my friend, so I started looking (I hadn't made too many changes recently to the computer before this started).

I think I narrowed the problem down to relating to some networking functionality. The hang doesn't occur in safe mode, but it DOES occur in safe mode with networking. I went into add/remove windows components, and unchecked the only box that was checked, Internet Gateway Device Discovery and Control Client, and rebooted into Safe Mode with networking. Voila! the hang was nonexistant! I was so excited I was about to post a thread about how I fixed it...

(aside: sorry about me including SO MUCH info, but I'm not sure what is relevant to troubleshooting this...)

This thread got me on track to troubleshooting in the 'networking' direction...
http://forums.techarena.in/windows-x...ort/778269.htm

I found several threads talking about changing the order of how windows loads some networking services, etc...this one in particular:

http://www.pctools.com/forum/archive...p/t-35847.html

Anyways, after I booted into safe mode w networking, the hang was gone, but once it got to the desktop, it was back, but quite a bit shorter. So I booted into regular mode, and the hang was still there.

I am hoping someone can help me troubleshoot this, I am not really looking for a catch all solution like "reinstall windows" or anything like that. I already ran sfc \scannow which didn't do anything (except unpatch my uxtheme.dll and uninstall my video drivers). I ran chkdsk which didn't do anything either. I tried changing the order like suggested in that 2nd thread but it didn't do anything either.

I only have 1 user account on this computer, Administrator. As you may be able to tell, I really want to find out what this problem is, not just fix it by wiping my user account or whatever.

I remember a utility that used to repair user registry hives or something of that nature...would that apply in this case?

I am checking through event viewer right now to see if I can find any gaps in the logs for clues...

Another clue: if I log off, then log back on, it hangs again at loading your personal settings...not much, if any, HDD activity during these hangs by the way.

The machine shuts down with no hangs at all (<15 seconds to shut down).

I read about enabling a verbose report for booting up activities or something, but I'm not sure how to do it, that might help as well.

edit: sigh. I just booted it up and the 'hang' is quite short now, about 30 seconds or so. I happen to keep a very close eye on my boot times (Bootvis, you know :P) and I know that this is over twice as long as my computer should be taking to start up. I really want to fix this! LOL not even sure if there is a problem now! I will just post what I have gone through so far, and await responses.

edit again: I just realized I didn't inlude much hardware info. I'm running:

HP EliteBook 6930p, XP 32 bit SP3, 4GB ram. The computer is 'networked' in a workgroup to share a mapped external hard drive thats connected to my desktop. I had some issues earlier today with an emulator that really hosed me for a moment, and I am sure this is caused by it somehow. I ran a command in the emulator (ePSXe, running 'Run from CDROM), and the emulator just closed, but the process was still running in task manager. I was unable to terminate it. Things got out of hand (read: I got impatient and opened 2 more instances with the same result) and eventually, I manually ended explorer.exe, then ran it using File>Run new task. The problem was, it didn't run! So then I couldn't close task manager or start up explorer.exe. So I hit ctrl+alt+del again and to my surprise, another task manager instance popped up. Got up to my 3rd task manager, with no explorer shell running, all minimized windows 3.1 style, and couldn't shut down using task managers shut down function either. In any case, I think this somehow hosed something. had to perform a hard shut down by holding power for 8 sec or so.

Thanks in advance!!

[kylezo]

sigh. I just accidentally hit alt+m and it took me to my home page after I got to the end of writing a long detailed troubleshooting post. serves me right for not writing in notepad I guess.

The gist:

The hanging seems to be intermittent. I got another hang, and found some 'interesting' event log entries:

All entries are normal and correct until:

Event Type: Warning
Event Source: Dhcp
Event Category: None
Event ID: 1003
Date: 3/12/2009
Time: 4:13:19 AM
User: N/A
Computer: 1337B00K
Description:
Your computer was not able to renew its address from the network (from the DHCP Server) for the Network Card with network address 00216A0A98F4. The following error occurred:
The semaphore timeout period has expired. . Your computer will continue to try and obtain an address on its own from the network address (DHCP) server.


Warning event id 1003 dhcp. This is immediately following the normal startup entry:

Event Type: Information
Event Source: Tcpip
Event Category: None
Event ID: 4201
Date: 3/12/2009
Time: 4:12:50 AM
User: N/A
Computer: 1337B00K
Description:
The system detected that network adapter Intel(R)...Link 5300 - Packet Scheduler Miniport was connected to the network, and has initiated normal operation over the network adapter.

Which occurs normally on each startup, of course. Then there are a few more normal startup entries, followed by what I believe to be THE CULPRIT:

Event Type: Warning
Event Source: BROWSER
Event Category: None
Event ID: 8021
Date: 3/12/2009
Time: 4:15:03 AM
User: N/A
Computer: 1337B00K
Description:
The browser was unable to retrieve a list of servers from the browser master \\KATHY-T5REM9P9D on the network \Device\NetBT_Tcpip_{0597287D-4268-4CD5-85C6-A2C6E2883833}. The data is the error code.


Notice the gap in time. My very last entry before this event is stamped at 4:13:36. This has got to be the problem.

So, now, I just need to know what it means :P and how I can fix it.

Thanks again, for any info or help provided!

note: don't laugh at my computer name :P I love this computer!

[kylezo]

guess I'm on my own on this one so far O.o

found out about verbose status reports:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/325376

So I'm doing that now.

edit: found this possible solution:
"Fixed it! It was incorrect DNS settings. In brief the work stations were searching for missing DNS numbers. Hope this helps anyone with similar problems"

and

"Correcting the DNS settings was exactly the fix I needed as well. Thanks."

but I don't know what this means. I'll look but...any help would be nice :P

[kinbard]

Sorry no one has replied. Unfortunately, I am done on the site for the day. I've suscribed to your thread, though, and will pick it up in the morning.
BTW, I have not read everything you posted, but try this. Have you xp disk ready. Click start, run, type cmd. At the prompt type sfc /scannow
Notice the space between the c and /
If it asks for the disk, put it in. More to come tommorrow.

[kylezo]

Thanks Kinbard!

tried that already though :( I think I mentioned that in the first post, btw :P

Although I do have an update:

I enabled verbose status messages and the hang occurs on "Restoring network connections"

So it MUST be related to one or both of those Event Log entries!

Thanks again!

edit: Googling this took me back to a MS KB article I ran by when I first started troubleshooting this, but I thought it didn't apply to me:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/816873

Turns out this might apply after all. Off I go to work on it some more!

[kylezo]

Wish I could edit my posts more than once...

Anyways...update:

That MSKB article I linked is getting very close...when I alt+tab on logon while it is hanging (during "restoring network connections" in verbose mode) the box for the error message does appear, and if I hit enter, it logs on fine.

Even if I switch to Win2000 style logon, alt+tabbing doesn't reveal the error message, so there is no way I can see what it is even saying. I tried disconnecting and re-mapping the network drive, on both ends, but it didn't change anything. So I think I've gone about as fer as I ken go (Oklahoma anyone?) because I can't find anything on google for this error message or a solution except for w2k servers and win95 and stuff that doesn't apply to me.

Help would be greatly appreciated! I've really narrowed it down now, I think.

Thanks!

[Riskyone101]

How are you connecting to the internet?.....

DHCP should be the way you need to connect to internet.

Dns is for domains. Requires password and username to connect to internet.

Did you check device manager to see if there are any exclamation points for driver updates?

[kylezo]

No problems in the device manager, although I updated my wireless card driver from the OEM website just to be sure.

I connect wirelessly, to a gateway/router.

I haven't done any more troubleshooting on this tonight, since I don't know what else to do. I scoured Google with stuff like
hang "restoring network connections"
what causes "restoring network connections" error
"loading your personal settings" "restoring network connections"
etc, etc

and I can't find much to be honest. When I alt+tab and exit out of this mysterious 'error' everything works perfectly fine.

I don't use an actual 'domain', per se, I map a drive in a Windows workgroup, using Windows Simple File Sharing.

I think I'm gonna post in some other forums, too, see if anyone else can help.

Let me know if you need any more info!

Thanks!

[kylezo]

Ok, update:

I tried replacing \\computername\share with \\ipaddress\share and that didn't change a thing.

check out this post, though, that I made in another forum regarding this issue:

I replaced the computer name with \\ip\share but that didn't help =/

I'm thinking in another direction now...try this on for size:

Since the day I got this computer (like 2 weeks ago) it's had strange wireless connectivity issues...sometimes it will say it's connected and I can ping to my hearts delight, but I get no pages up and if I try sending larger packets than ~35 bytes I get time outs. For instance, with trying to find the largest MTU packet for optimization purposes (I am usine PPoE so I already have it set at 1492) with TCP Optimizer I will send 40 bytes, then 750...and the 750 will time out. If I reset my connection i.e. tap my little wireless button off and on, it will reconnect within seconds and the connection will be stable. I am starting to think, more and more, that this has something to do with it. I was going to troubleshoot it over in the DSLreports forum and other such forums at a later date after settling this issue, but when I noticed that my connection had to be reset first thing on one of my boots, I had the thought that maybe it's unable to connect to the share for this reason (whatever is causing this issue). 2 birds with one stone there, or rather, I would only have 1 bird if I had gotten rid of that issue when it first arose.

I am thinking this should have been started over in the network forum :P
What do you guys think about this wierd intermittent connectivity thing? could it be related? I mean, it's been an issue since long before this 'restoring network connections' error issue came about, and since that's consistent every time now, I'm not sure that it's related, but seems like it could be.

Just thought I'd throw it out there.

I had apparently, inadvertantly during the troubleshooting process, turned on that damned show UPnP devices discovery thing in my network places which then made my systray icons dissappear. Luckily Google answered that question for me.

Anyways...I'll be back around this thread later, I'm sure, since I tend to stay up for god-awful amounts of time when I'm dealing with something like this =S

[kylezo]

Wow, can't even edit that post for a first time :P This is definitely against 'double posting' rules :D

UPDATE:

I disabled the wireless and plugged directly into my gateway/router via ethernet, result: the 'hang' is very short, possibly in the realm of a normal startup speed. This means that I can say definitively that this has something to do with wireless protocol or hardware. Right? lol. When I started up with wireless AND ethernet enabled, the hang still happened and I had to alt+tab-enter to continure login. Only when I had only ethernet did the hang seem to be alleviated.

Just thought I'd throw this new info into the ring. I thought there was nothing left I could do but I was wrong!

edit: man I gotta get some sleep...tomorrow I think I'll try changing my gateways' MAC address, maybe that will do something... T_T

[kinbard]

Reading everything, I think it is a neworking issue. More than likely, a router issue. I will see about having the thread moved.

[johnwill]

Try disabling groups of startup applications in normal mode using MSCONFIG. See if you can narrow down one startup process or service that is causing the delay.

[kylezo]

Booting in safe mode with networking causes the error as well. So, everything that's enabled in safe mode with networking is the possible culprit. That's how I know it's a networking issue. The problem now is I can't see the error message! I'd probably have some idea of what to do next if I could actually read it.

kinbard, what kind of router issue do you think this could be? Like I said before, I have been using this setup without a problem for quite some time. I just can't figure out what causes the error message, or what it even says.

I did recently change the broadcast band and power settings on my router to try to help with interference from wireless handsets. I'll change it back. Never thought to do that because I assumed it was something in windows.

Thanks for the responses!

John, I'm not really sure how to go about troubleshooting processes and programs and stuff in safe mode. can I use MSconfig to single things out there as well?

[kinbard]

Johnwill has far more experience in this area than me, but the changes could have caused the issue.

[kylezo]

Thank you for having my thread movied, and thanks for your input too :)

Any takers?

[kinbard]

No problem. Thats what we are here for.

[kylezo]

Update:

The delay is down around 10 seconds at "Restoring Network Connections". I had to remove the network shares completely, the re-establish them in the correct order - the host machine, then the other laptop that would be connecting to it. I guess the problem was that I turned the share on in the wrong order.

Thanks!

[johnwill]

FWIW, if you have a bunch of mapped drives, you can experience such issues. The "errors" you mention are pretty normal initialization happenings, they happen in several of my event logs on systems here. This is just the flaky workgroup networking and the master browser election process.

AAMOF, I just checked my logs here:

Your computer was not able to renew its address from the network (from the DHCP Server) for the Network Card with network address 005056C00008. The following error occurred:
The semaphore timeout period has expired. . Your computer will continue to try and obtain an address on its own from the network address (DHCP) server.

The browser was unable to retrieve a list of servers from the browser master \\HAWKING on the network \Device\NetBT_Tcpip_{D2AA5AD4-6D05-4BFD-A8F3-D64151671383}. The data is the error code.

[kylezo]

Yeah, I can still alt+tab to the "Restore Network Connections" process but it no longer hangs the system for 7+ minutes. I always wished I could see what the error message said, but I'm just relieved it's no longer a problem!

btw, aamof? LOL that's a new one on me!

OH i get it! as a matter of fact!
I'm so smart :D