Slow XP boot BEFORE logon

OS: XP Pro SP2
CPU: Pent D 805
MB: Asus P5LD2 r2.0

I built this PC a little over a month ago and the boot time was blazing fast for a couple weeks. However, the last few weeks it has slowed down tremendously. This is not an issue where after I login it takes forever to get to the desktop, that actually happens quite quickly, but instead the problem seems to be with the PC hanging on the windows splash screen with the ticking marks right after the POST and before the login.

This person seems to have a similar problem to me, but no one offered any help that solved the problem it would seem.

http://ask.metafilter.com/mefi/31980

My startup programs pretty much only consist of Zone Alarm suite and my Catalyst driver center. I am fairly computer literate and have cleaned up my boot programs and even used Bootvis to try and solve the problem, but still nothing. Any suggestions? Thanks for your time.

p.s.> I suppose I should include that I have defragmented already, and no noticeable improvement in boot resulted.

Control panel>tools>disconnect network drive, returns the msg "You have no network drives to disconnect". I thought I might have had something still up since I transferred files from my old PC to this one and it might have been causing the PC to hang at start, but nothing was detected. However, I still have a hunch the problems might have started around the time I did set up that connection between PCs, but I cannot pinpoint that with precision, just a hunch.

Just timed the reboot, takes 4 minutes to get into usable XP. My old Dell 933mhz boots faster than that (3 minutes, I just timed it) and it has XP pro and way more applications at startup... something has to be fishy here!

Lordy my system takes about 45 secs from power on to get to the user selection screen and then about 20 secs from there to login and start up all services and pop up all icons in the Systray.

Find your Boot.ini file in the root folder of C:\ (you may need to go to My Computer>Tools>Folder Options>View tab, select "Show hidden files and folders", and uncheck "Hide protected operating system files" before you can see it). The find the line similar to this:

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Home" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn

and append " /SOS" without the quotes (don't forget the space before the forward slash). That will show the drivers, etc. as they load, and will hopefully give some clue as to what is causing the delay.

Ok, so I did that and it appears to be a Mup.sys hang. I did some googling and found a thread that has been going for 3 years.

http://www.annoyances.org/exec/forum/winxp/t1047532372

However, there never seems to be 1 solution that worked for everyone. A combination of reloading Mup.sys to fiddling with hardware. SuperSparks, you've helped me on multiple problems and I trust your knowledge... any ideas on what to try? I'm gonna fiddle with some things. Another problem I have is that occasionally on the login screen my keyboard will not respond (I can't type in my pw or do ctrl+alt+del, or anything) I unplug it and plug it back in and everything works. I saw some mentioning of usb problems so I'll try some reboots without a keyboard and I'll also check to see if any of my BIOS settings are doing funny things like some people posted. Let me know if you've handled this Mup.sys before. Thanks again for your time!

p.s.> No results with USB device theory, or BIOS. I had also added /noguiboot when u had me do the /sos, so I didn't notice this until I took /noguiboot off. The mup.sys is the last driver I see in the list then it goes to a blue ms background displaying my OS and my CPU, then it goes to a black screen and says:

"Checking file system on C:/
The volume is clean
Windows has finished checking the disk."

Is that a normal part of boot? Or could that also be whats causing the delay?

Also gonna quick and swap my dimms into another channel.

No success with moving my dimms or resetting CMOS. :(

The "checking file system on C:" message is a result of adding the /SOS switch - it not only displays the drivers and system files as they load but also does a disk check too. It isn't the cause of the problem.

As you've already discovered, hanging on Mup.sys is a royal pain to try and resolve. I'll do a bit of digging and get back to you, as being an MVP gives me access to some useful extra resources.

I have no idea if it has anything to do with mup.sys, but maybe try unplugging all USB devices and see if it still happens. Also you could try a repair install, that shouldn't damage any data on your HD and from my experience most programs still work after a repair and install.

I don't know if you saw this page or not, you probrably did but they said they just loaded optimized bios settings and it was resolved.

http://www.annoyances.org/exec/forum/winxp/1075087263

Ok SuperSparks, thanks for sticking with me on this one, hehe.

btcomm, Id rather try the repair as a last resort :/. And I did the BIOS stuff, nothing :/ same with usb devices :/. Kinda frustrating. Thanks thought for the ideas. Anymore?