Thanks for the suggestions Vanguard. I downloaded SysInternals AutoRuns and
found some left over stuff from Avast! -- "files not found" and deleted
them. Also went to Event Viewer and found several errors that were related
to the Avast! residue. After all of this "cleanup", the 11-12 blue bar
passes remain unchanged. Not sure where to look next. Guess I'll just live
with it as my XP loads in just under a minute.
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bobster said:
When XP SP3 is loading, how many passes of the blue progress bar is
typical
before the "Welcome" screen appears? Mine use to take about 4-5 passes
but
now takes about 11-12.
I have only 3 things on my msconfig start list, use MS Essentials
virus/spyware and regularly run malwarebytes. How can I reduce the number
of passes of the blue progress bar?
How many startup programs you chose to load on Windows startup. How many
services are enabled and how many you added for software installs. If any
of them perform intensive disk activities (cleanup, scan, etc). If WGA
connects to go look for an update. If any of your security programs check
for an update (anti-virus, firewall, HIPS, anti-malware, etc). Some
security products are more intrusive than others during startup, like MSE
will chomp up 90%, or more, CPU usage during startup than, say, Avast. The
more you install on your host the more startup programs you end up with and
the more that want to go check for updates. Poorly coded, incompatible, or
conflicting drivers can cause enlongated startup times.
Use SysInternals' AutoRuns to see all the locations used to define startup
programs that load up on your host. msconfig will only show some of the
startup locations. Also, many services added by software installs won't
show up in msconfig because those services get rolled in a common instance
of svchost.exe. Both msconfig and AutoRuns will show the list of services
but not what is rolled into svchost.exe, so go look at your list of services
(run services.msc) to see what got added. You might also start looking in
the Event Viewer (eventvwr.exe) to see if there are any errors occurring
during startup.