XP freezes at start up

[austinh]

After logging into XP the screen just loads the wallpaper and nothing else. There are no icons, and no taskbar. I have to do a hard restart and try and log in again. I am working on a Dell Optiplex 745. Nothing new has been installed and no new hardware.

Any Ideas?

 

[theo1881]

have you tried starting in safe mode ?

give this a go and run spyware, anti-virus protection etc

Laters, phat, headshape

 

[wahnula]

Sounds like it's a problem with explorer.exe. If you can hit the Windows key and navigate with your keyboard, get to Run, hit Enter, type cmd, hit Enter, and with the Windows disk in the CD tray type

sfc /scannow

at the command prompt and hit Enter. This starts System File Checker and pulls any missing or corrupted system files from the CD. And I second the spyware/virus scan, Spybot, Adaware, A-squared, AVG are all free. Use them all for spyware, but just one for AntiVirus. Best of luck.

Tony

"If it can't take it, I don't want it

 

[austinh]

awesome! Thanks for the advice guys. Thanks Wahnula for the detailed explanation. I will try it and let you know what happens.

 

[vanka25]

We have a bunch of Optiplex 745's and they all seem to have this issue; it doesn't happen at every boot, but just enough to be mildly annoying. I usually just hit Ctrl-Alt-Del, go to Task Manager, and start explorer.exe manually (File -> New Task -> "explorer".

 

[SpiderElls82]

Greetings. I would suggest you clean up your startup icons. There are plenty of problems that can be caused there.

Here's a good link that will show you how to clean that up. If you aren't quite sure what the "startup item" name is...do a google search and click on the link that has the lilutilities.com - a really good site for finding out what processes are necessary.

Here it be:

http://www.pacs-portal.co.uk/startup_content.php

REMOVE ANYTHING that is not entirely necessary. Leave your security programs. The only thing you need in the startup items list are security programs. Everything else (if you're using Windows XP) you should remove.