Desktop icons take almost 3 minutes to load upon boot

[jime0726]

hey guys, hopefully this will be an easy one...everytime i boot my machine in the morning, or anytime during the day if i restart it, it takes almost 3 min (maybe more) to have my desktop icons finally appear. and even though my task bar and systray all load up right away, nothing can be used till my icons appear. running w2k pro, ran spybot already and did an entire disk cleanup, disk defrag and still happens. i've actually gotten the dr. watson error twice since this has been happening when windows loads. havent gotten that in about a week now though. our AV def's update every week and i scanned my machine twice with negative results. any help is appreciated, thanks.

[TallCool1]

...everytime i boot my machine in the morning, or anytime during the day if i restart it, it takes almost 3 min (maybe more) to have my desktop icons finally appear. and even though my task bar and systray all load up right away, nothing can be used till my icons appear.

How much memory do you have? Drive space? Combine low memory with a fragmented, nearly-full hard drive and things slow w-a-a-a-y down at boot-time.

[jime0726]

running w2k pro with 384mgs mem, 40gig hdd with 30gigs free, virtual mem was at 512-1024.....just changed to 2048-2048 and i'll see how that works. will run the defrag again to see if that helps also.

[antioed]

Anything we should know about the network you're on? Is this a corporate network/domain? Are you using a firewall? Do you get network drives mapped...are you using network printers?

[jime0726]

everything is on a corporate domain, all mapped drives, we are using an external firewall (watchguard firebox) all printers are connecting through UNC. my profile was roaming but switched it back to local and that did nothing. uninstalled all software i didnt need, thinking that my roaming profile was loading huge amounts of data back and forth. i could very easily re-image my machine but i'd rather not have it down for 20min during the day and have to load all the admin tools back on. anything else you need to know, please ask away....thanks.

[antioed]

Backup your profile and create a new one. Also you should check for network printers that aren't available, sometimes they can cause it too. A firewall is always suspect for that since any time you're in a domain and you have an active network connection Windows will be trying to perform functions with the domain...if for some reason the ports/IP it wants to hit aren't available you'll end up with the behavior very similar to what you're seeing with the slowness. But this is usually for a local software firewall such as Zone Alarm...I guess the hope for the external firewall is that either:

a. The firewall is configured properly and traffic required for normal domain function is allowed internally to the clients.
b. The firewall is only concerned with external traffic and will not block any communications with your domain servers.

Also some VPN clients are known to cause this stuff...if you are running any of those you might want to check your services and make sure it's not running.

...so try the profile thing and also the printer stuff. You can use net stop spooler at the Run prompt, if you can get to the Task Manager (ctrl+Shift+Esc) you can run the net stop command as a "New Task" and maybe get around the hang while you're waiting for the desktop to come up. I've noticed that sometimes, for whatever stupid reason, if you launch Task Manager when it's hanging it will suddenly start working right again...go figure! It's possible you're just seeing the old Win2K suck in which case you might save yourself some grief and go for that re-image. Here's another thought...not sure how you're imaging but why not take a snapshot of your machine once it's all configured with the software the way you like it and then use that for the next re-image! Cheers.

[jime0726]

well, i know its not the firewall because this just started happening a few weeks ago and i've been monitoring it and nothing has changed for 1/2 a yr. i dont think it would be the printers because everybody else would be having the same lag i am and everyone's working fine...if it was anything on the domain/network, it would be affecting everyone else and not just my machine. i'm going to run a few more diagnostics on my machine and if worst comes to worst, i'll just have to create a new image from my machine and blow it away after, which would suck but theres nothing else we can do. thanks for your help though.

[kc0arf]

Hi,

I doubt it is the firewall. If your network traffic is routed through your firewall to get to the servers, there is something wrong. Then again, there could be an internal firewall, but that doesn't make sense here.

You mention your desktop icons. Are they shortcuts, or full-blown data files and programs? Reason I ask is that if you are using a roaming profile, and these files are large, the profile is transferring them back and forth through the network to populate the system. It is a dangerous thing to keep live files on the desktop -- only keep shortcuts there.

I have also seen cases where in Novell networks that zenworks policies created a lot of network traffic trying to sync with other servers, especially in the start menu. Has your company recently re-named or decommissioned one of your servers? You might be trying to resolve broken links.

I would put money on a corrupt profile.

Christian

[jime0726]

pretty much everything on my desktop is either shortcuts to programs and folders or regular documents (one of which is tiff format). so theres really nothing on my desktop thats overloading my profile, and i've actually been off my roaming profile for a few weeks now. i actually let my system defrag overnight, came in, it was done, rebooted my machine and still was dogging it (another 3min)...but today again i got that dr. watson error so i think youre right that something is corrupt. maybe some program thats trying to load that isnt? i think thats what a dr. watson is. and i did notice as it was loading, i was watching my AV load and it remained disabled till my icons loaded and thats when i got the dr. watson. dont know if that has something to do with it or not but its something else that i'm noticing. thanks for the help guys! one more thing, the only firewall i'm going through is the external one, the only firewall we load on anyone are on laptops we give out for people taking them out of the office (zone alarms).