[sdw2003] Vista boot weirdness

[Rich Ernst]

Pardon if some of this is vague, as I'm not a Vista expert, hence my
questions/pleas for help.

Client's Vista machine, with current service pack and updates, older
version of Office, Skype, Picasa, not much more.  Older notebook,
maybe 3 years old(?), but a gig of ram and decent cpu.

Almost every time the system is turned on, it seems to come up and
gets to the screen where there's a box in the middle saying something
like "Windows is starting up", mouse cursor is spinning like the
system or whatever is busy.  Then it just sits there like that, I've
waited over 5 minutes for it to boot, nope.

Now the really weird part.  If you hit the power button (not hold it
to force power off), moments later it says "Windows is shutting down",
and it does!  Then, hit the power button again and it's up in a minute
or two, max, really quite quickly.   After everything settles down,
antivirus verifies updates, etc.  Do a clean shutdown and power off.
Boot again and we're back to the first part where it just sits saying
it's starting up.

I haven't spent a lot of time with autoruns or msconfig to remove
startup items yet, haven't found anything in my searches for this
problem online, so thought I'd run it out for you folks' thoughts, and
first things to try, vs. one by one trial and error removing things
from startup, etc.

Sorry, I haven't had a chance to do much testing (don't want to charge
per hour for what might be a LONG diagnosis on a system that otherwise
works fine), including not testing safe mode boots.

Oh, have run memtest for 24+ hours, no problems, ran Hitachi's disk
diagnostics, no problems.   And once the system boots fine, it works
flawlessly and plenty fast for the client's needs (minimal, mostly web
and webmail).

I know this is a long shot, but just seeing if anyone has run into
this problem or similar and has suggestions for first steps.

Thanks,

Rich

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