Saving your settings -- I've tried all, now what?

[Iain McCracken]

You've heard it all before... my system almost hangs at the "saving your
settings" message.

I want to know how to reasonably find out what is happening, and not flail
around turning things off at random.

Mouse is jerky, and stops for seconds at a time, and the cooling fan comes
on full blast, indicating heavy CPU load.

KB307274: I have SP2. I have the welcome screen disabled. I do not have far
eastern languages installed. My default input language is EN-US, not IME.
This KB article is not applicable to me...

I have disabled: event-logging, nvidia driver helper, terminal services.
I have disabled nvidia desktop manager, and nview media center.

Shutdown is fast after a safe mode boot (F5/F8 during boot).
Shutdown is sometimes fast after booting on a 'diagnostic startup' selected
from msconfig, but not always.

I usually just hibernate to get around this system failure, but after a few
days XP's cruftiness level gets too high and I have to reboot to get it
working again. Usually this happens at an inconvenient time.

Is there a way of finding out what was sucking all my cycles during this
time, so I can go and uninstall/fix the POS?

 

[Mark L. Ferguson]

If you run an XP "Upgrade"setup, from the original, or "Gold" version of the setup CD, and you have SP2 installed, it might go into
a setup loop, and you could lose your install. Uninstall SP2, BEFORE you Upgrade setup from CD (that lacks sp2 on it.)
875350 - How to remove Windows XP Service Pack 2 from your computer: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=875350
How to Perform a Windows XP Repair Install: http://michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm