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Every time I login into my computer (Win 7 x64) its stuck at the wallpaper, and I have to wait about 30 minutes until the explorer.exe decides to run.

What I've tried so far:

  1. I don't have access to Ctrl+Alt+Del to manually execute, so that's not an option

  2. Win+R won't run either

  3. Full scanned for malware with HitmanPro

  4. Ran SFC

  5. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon - Shell value (with explorer.exe) is correct.

Any ideas please?

1 Answer 1

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Sorry, no points to be able to comment here yet.

Guesses:
- extremely large thumbnails.db (and desktop 'loads' those from this cache)
- desktop icons with netshares that take long time to respond (but this should be limited by some registry setting...)

Advice:
Since you can run SFC, then you could probably download Process Explorer (produced by Microsoft Sysinternals team, freeware), and kill/restart Explorer or record the whole boot process with for example Process Monitor (add it to Windows autostart), and diagnose the problem thoroughly.

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  • Can you please tell more about the thumbnails.db files and the desktop icons with netshares?)
    – Tiago
    Jan 4, 2016 at 15:44
  • thumbnails db is sometimes huge file, collecting smaller images, previews. If You have, or used to have a lot of images they are all cached. I find this rather unlikely but I've read about people having them as large as few GiB. And shortcuts (not just icons, sorry about that typo) to network places, on desktop can be also accessed by system, thus it might be cause this hangup Yoyu are experiencing.
    – JustMe
    Jan 4, 2016 at 15:51
  • Just did a major housekeeping (using glary utilities and diskDefrag), and still no luck. Also removed all my network shortcuts as you advised.
    – Tiago
    Jan 4, 2016 at 17:33
  • Then I guess You'll need to record this problem with Process monitor. It's pretty straightforward, here You have good explanation how to setup boot time recording. Then paste this text file somewhere, and link here so we could check.
    – JustMe
    Jan 5, 2016 at 8:52

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