The Glade 4.0

So I've been on the same XP install for probably close to about 3-4 years now. For the most part, I have no gripes. I have an odd problem immediately after reaching the desktop though. It actually gets to the desktop just as quick as it always has. Upon reaching the desktop though, there's a lot of disk activity and the machine basically chugs anywhere from 40 seconds to a minute before its responsive to whatever apps I launch. I've opened Task Manager up and it does come up within about 20 seconds, but doesn't seem to show anything out of the ordinary.

I've cut all unnecessary services.
I have very little in my startup.
I've defragged.
I've virus-scanned (Avast anti-virus).
I've malware-scanned (Malware Bytes, Spybot).
I ran ComboFix (to detect rootkits).

I'm coming up with nothing. I can't think of what I possibly did that's causing this. About the only thing configuration-wise I can think of is I updated my video driver. But that later caused problems in a game I was playing at the time so I reverted back to the old driver (uninstalled new driver, re-installed old).

Any ideas?

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The Dude abides.

To be honest, 40 second to a minute of chugging sounds kind of like par for the course for Windows.

That said, let's start with a differential diagnosis. First try booting the machine up, and letting it sit at the login screen for several minutes before logging in. This might help us determine if the culprit is something started pre-login (system services, mainly) or post-login.

Either way, the problem could be something started from HKLM -- a machine-wide setting, or something in HKCU -- something user-specific. The easiest way to test that is to create a new user account and log in with that. You could use the Administrator account, but it's kind of a pain to get to in XP, and it might not have a fresh default profile if you've ever used it before. Be aware that if you create a new account, the first time you log in will take a bit longer than usual since it has to create a copy of the default user profile, etc. Once you've logged in with it the first time, reboot your machine and try logging in with the new user instead of your own to see if it exhibits the same behavior.

For a more direct diagnosis, you can try using ProcMon and DiskMon from Sysinternals. You can use these to log and monitor file and disk access, but getting them started with the correct filters in place early enough to determine what's chewing on the HDD could be problematic. Similarly, ProcExp or even just the standard task manager (bleh) can be set up to show I/O reads and/or writes. Of course, not all I/O ops are disk I/O specifically, but it could at least narrow the field.

One obvious question, though, is how full is your hard drive? Assuming you have a traditional magnetic platter hard drive (as opposed to a solid-state disk), data is written to the disk from the outside "cylinders" in. As you move towards the inner cylinders, performance decreases because the linear velocity decreases. So as your disk gets full, you're utilizing the slower areas of the disk to a greater extent. Especially if data needed at startup time is located towards the inner tracks, this can noticeably slow things down at start up time.

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

The machine stops hard disk activity shortly after reaching the login screen. Upon logging it, it starts doing the same old chugging.

Creating a new account does the exact same thing after that first login/reboot.

I have two partitions on one drive 300GB drive. The 50GB system partition is around 20GB so not even half full. The other partition is barely over 70GB. So I have plenty of drive space.

I'll try booting into safe mode fairly soon to see if it does the same thing.

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The Dude abides.

Have you looked at msconfig (start -> run -> msconfig -> startup tab) and looked at everything that starts up? That program is usually my go-to place for anything that is bringing me to a crawl. If you see things you're unsure of, google them and it will help you track down what's going on.

To me it sounds like you have a lot of programs performing update checks. Java, quicktime, adobe, and similar programs are extremely guilty of that crap.

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Les Zombis et les Loups-Garous!

Yeah, I've done that.

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The Dude abides.

Hate to do it myself, but here's my slacker advice.

Back up your data to a thumb drive. Back up your game installs to another.

Reformat.

Reinstall, one piece at a time.

It will take awhile, but a several years old install is usually a labyrinth of things that can go wrong when you fix the last thing that you could find that went wrong.

Colonel Murphy lies in wait.

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The U. S. Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up with it yourself. B. Franklin

"A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone." -- Tyrion Lannister, A Game of Thrones

msconfig is pretty much ***, though.

I'd recommend autoruns by (you guessed it) Sysinternals. It's way more thorough.

Anyway, I'm not really sure what else to tell you. What does your commit charge look like (especially immediately after login) with respect to how much physical memory you have? Setting some performance counters and watching for pagefile hits and peak memory usage might be interesting.

_________________
Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.