Shortcut problem

For about 5 minutes after bootup my desktop shortcuts won't work and I have problems with the programs menu responding too. All fine if I wait, but it's annoying.
Little blue rotating circle seems active during this period. It's the Win7 64bit system that gives this issue. I did post some time ago and one suggestion was to turn off indexing - can't find the replies now, hence the re-post as it's getting worse.

Do you have mapped network drives to non-existant locations?

List the antimalware programs you have installed

Is hard disk at capacity?

Run a defrag

Do you have many folders and icons on the desktop (in particularly non-shortcuts).

Try disabling NIC in device manager, and see if problem goes away.

Whilst this is occuring, go into task manager and see what is consuming the most CPU. Go to view > select columns, add I/O Read/Write Bytes, see if anything is climbing considerably.

Do you have anything peculiar set to run at startup?

Edited by Pipexer (Thu 24-Feb-11 19:04:19)

Thanks for that - very helpful. I suspect the Dell Support Center is scanning my system every time I boot up. It's in the Startup list and I thought I'd disabled the little blighter the first day I got the computer, but it's come back! I tried looking at the Performance Monitor during bootup but of course I don't get a response until whatever is doing this has finished. Anyway, I've completely uninstalled the Support Center so here's hoping for tomorrow's startup.
Just one question - would I not lose my Ethernet internet connectivity if I disabled the NIC? I do have McAfee running at startup and I know that this can slow things down a bit, but I've never heard of it disabling shortcuts. No other malware program on the system. Newish HD and only 7 shortcuts on the desktop.

You would lose connectivity but worth as a troubleshooting measure to see it it has any effect. Let's see what removing dell stuff did and post back if it didn't solve the problem.

If you're up for it, install CCleaner and post (or PM) a screenie of your startup list from that. There's probably a few things that can be disabled.

I have seven items enabled (three are sound or input device items, one is user installed, two are security, and one is system). Twenty two items disabled.

It's not a shortcut problem.

Whats hapening is when you bootup windows everytime, you have instructed windows to run lots of programs straight away which is taking up all your system resources and the blue circle/hour glass is telling you to wait for it to finish starting up all of them at the same time.

It is highly unlikely it was just the dell support or the indexing service causing the problem. I'm not currently running Windows 7 as It's a pain in the butt when trying to do advanced procedures, so i cant give you exact answer.

Do as the other poster advised, and open the task manager by pressing and holding down CTRL, ALT and DELETE and clicking on task manager, and report back how many applications, processes in total your running. I'm expecting you have well over 60 items running all at the same time.

On windows XP and Vista, if you type msconfig in either the RUN/SEARCH BOX in the bottom left corner it will bring up a msconfig window, and on one of the tabs on the top row is called startup. It will list all the programs you have told Windows to start automatically when you turn on your computer.

Thanks for helping, everyone. I have 15 startup items. The Dell Support Center has been zapped and I also had something called 'Virgin Media Hub'. I do have VM but I don't use their new hub; I remember that this program has needed me to manually close it down a few times as it was stopping my computer from logging off my profile. That has now been wiped. Things have definitely speeded up now, but I'll see what else I can disable there. A mate at work has said that you can actually disable all the startup items (except firewall/antivirus) and then re-enable one by one to see if there's one that's hanging. I might give it a try if the problem re-occurs.

Do a google for the Black Viper who is the oracle when it comes to configuring your start up processes.

Stop!

Sometimes there are items in the list which enable graphics and/or input devices. The latter can be sorted, but I've seen situations where folk boot up to a black screen.

Refer you to my earlier post. Basically, you'll probably have four to ten items enabled at the end of things. It all depends on your setup.

Edited by camieabz (Fri 25-Feb-11 10:10:46)