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When I boot up my system I get a strange result: I get a blank screen before the desktop comes up and it remains "blank" for about 1 min. and then the desktop shows up in all of my startup items begin to run.

I've tried turning it off with msconfig and the same thing happens – about a minute or so of "dead" screen.

Any idea of what is going on?

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    "dead screen"... Does that mean it shows black, white, or your wallpaper?
    – RobinJ
    Nov 14, 2011 at 19:37
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    Have you got any mapped network drives, or external devices that it may be waiting on? Does it do this when booting into Safe Mode? What was "it" that you turned off via MSConfig?
    – Ƭᴇcʜιᴇ007
    Nov 14, 2011 at 19:58
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    is just showing my wallpaper. No mapped drives, a number of external devices, but the same thing happens if I disable them. I turned off all of my startup items and tried rebooting on a "clean" system.
    – greenber
    Nov 14, 2011 at 20:25
  • Did you try Safe Mode?
    – Ƭᴇcʜιᴇ007
    Nov 14, 2011 at 21:04
  • yes, I tried Safe Mode. It doesn't really show me anything since there is such a sizable delay in redrawing the icons. I can tell you only about the delay I'm speaking of happened some time between the bios "reset" and the operating system/desktop becoming available.
    – greenber
    Nov 14, 2011 at 21:38

2 Answers 2

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This can be a sign of a corrupt user account (or possibly malware), you better create another admin account before the current one fails completely, this way you can still log on as an admin to troubleshoot and possibly repair the old account. Try enabling Boot Logging, then restart and have a look at the logs.

Try a clean boot to see if the problem resolves itself, if it does then it is a startup Program or 3rd party service causing it.

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  • I always have two administration accounts(think belt and suspenders)I was just about to try boot logging…
    – greenber
    Nov 14, 2011 at 21:57
  • Does it do this for all accounts?
    – Moab
    Nov 14, 2011 at 22:36
  • yes, it does unfortunately
    – greenber
    Nov 14, 2011 at 23:19
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    probably not a user profile issue then, have you scanned for malware yet? See the link I posted.
    – Moab
    Nov 15, 2011 at 1:07
  • Yes, I scanned for malware: using both Avast (for viruses) and malwarebytes (for nastyware) – both came up clean. The Boot Log I got through ProcMon does not appear as with the help file that you forwarded me – from above – can you give me a hand in deciphering it?
    – greenber
    Nov 15, 2011 at 2:25
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I don't have that much experience with 7, but a black screen for a relatively long period (probably only 20 seconds, but seems like several minutes) is not unusual during boot-up on Vista.

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  • no, this just started happening. The only thing that I had done was to install SP1 on Visual Studio; uninstalling it had no effect. One of the things I enjoyed about transiting from Vista to Windows 7 was a faster startup time. I'm hoping that I don't have to reinstall. The boot up repair found nothing wrong.
    – greenber
    Nov 15, 2011 at 14:16
  • There used to be a setting in Windoze that would enable a startup log. Don't recall the details, but you might try to find that.
    – Daniel R Hicks
    Nov 15, 2011 at 18:29
  • How about network drives? I suspect that on our box at home the delay is related to a network drive.
    – Daniel R Hicks
    Nov 15, 2011 at 19:56
  • nope....stand alone PC...I recall that setting as well,,,from safe mode, maybe?
    – greenber
    Nov 16, 2011 at 15:58
  • Here is some old info on the startup log.
    – Daniel R Hicks
    Nov 17, 2011 at 1:07

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