Bootup Issue

Hey I just wanted yall's opinion on this. Im running XP Pro fully patched with an AMD processor and 512 megs of ram. sometimes ( this is just random) i get thru bootup, example: it says loading your windows personal settings then it loads my desktop background but nothing else! no taskbar,icons or anything at all... the only thing I can access is Task Manager and when i look it im running between 17-23 process whereas normally I ran about 35. Now if i press the reset button on my pc and restart then the problem goes away and I boot right up. Im clear of spyware/virus as far as I know. any ideas? thanx!

is explorer.exe running? try pressing ctrl + alt + del and run explorer if not.

tex,

giving you a moment to absorb this...

its goin to CRASH, take back up and check the hard disk. used to happen to me before mine used to shut down a lot. used to think that its normal and maybe its just windows didnt load properly.

i had to buy a new hard disk. and all the problems went away.

haha, bagggie you're funny...

Anyway, metguru has the right idea... Ctrl+alt+del to get to task manager, then click file > new task > type "explorer"

Also check event viewer to see if there are any errors...

Well you should disable the startup scans that shoot up when windows boots. They take up lot of processing power of PC at boot.

What about the CPU Usage? Is it 100% or near. If yes what processes are causing it ?

Which processes haven't loaded? System processes or user ones ?

Make a backup just in case !

I ran the file check from Seagate as requested by Bagggi and I got this: Results for volume H: (NTFS)
Volume Label:
Volume Size: 82.34 GB
Some files on the volume are open. This may effect the accuracy of the file system check and result in false errors.
The file system contains errors that need to be repaired.

I ran it in safe mode with networking... it said since I had errors to run chkdsk/f so I did that also and I dont think that picked up anything ( I wasnt home when it finished) and it seemed to boot fine but like i said its random. I have my start up down to bear bones now and my CPU usage is at 6%. right now im running 33 processes. Oh, almost everytime this happens explorer.exe is already running it just takes forever for my desktop to fully load sometimes.

my event viewer seemed clean... but I did find THIS from MS.

Sounds to me that your hard drive is taking a dump on you. I would run a hardware diagnosics to see if there is any issues there. Explorer.exe is failing to boot, you will normally see this if there is a virus or a hardware issue. Mainly the hard drive.

damn no good news..... i guess i will be backing up my data and getting a new HD :(

one more thing tex,

i remember using registry cleaners on some of the computers that used to give this problem. i had read this topic somewhere(cant seem to find it now), that sometimes its the registry not loading properly.

both

registry mechanic and tuneup utilities did a very good job.

tuneup gives a full working program for a month, try it.

both of them will fix the BSOD problem you might be facing.

Baggi, thanx for those links i was very impressed with tuneup util. ! it seemed to help loads