Windows XP SP3 - problems with Explorer

alles

Hi,

anyone have any ideas of best next course of action?

I have a relatively new Acer laptop with WIN XP Sp3. It was a vista machine as new, but came with XP downgrade discs, which I needed to run certain software.

It was fine at first, but after about a week (and a lot of programs and data loaded onto it) it started giving hassle, mostly around the Windows Explorer program.

The things it does are:

1) Start up - mostly takes a long time after logging in to bring up the desktop and startbar/icons. Sometimes, it starts up in a jiffy, but seldom. Occasionally, if I do something like put a CD in while this wait is going on, then the icons or startbutton/task bar do not appear at all and I have to hold the 'off button' for a hard reset. I should note that ctrl-alt-del does not work when this blank screen happens, but ctrl-shift-esc does, so I can get the list of programs/processes up. explorer.exe is running in the processes. Terminating the explorer.exe process it and restarting it makes no difference. Other programs will run ok, but its no fun that way.

2) Shut down or log off - "Program not responding - explorer.exe" comes up every time, and a button has to be manually clicked to say "end program"

3) Once I do shut the explorer.exe in that manner, then if I am logging off to start a new user session, then log off proceeds, but the next log-in screen will then not appear. Likewise if the laptop is put to sleep mode (e.g. by closing the cover down) - it will get as far as showing the desktop background with no login screen; or if I disable the option to require login, it does not show the icons or the taskbar/start button.

4) If I right click on the windows start button, and choose properties, there are 2 tabs where user preferences can be edited : 'start menu' and 'taskbar'. I have not tried the start menu one, but the taskbar one - if any changes are made here, then it takes about 3 mins for them to be accepted and control to return to the screen as normal.

5) Possibly unrelated? When I plug in USB devices the mouse ( a USB mouse) gets lost for about 30secs, and sometimes the system freezes for up to a minute.

As per various other internet fora recommendations, I have tried fiddling with user accounts, I have run spyware/virus/malware checks, no avail. I have turned off a lot of start-up services etc but to no avail. I have checked for errors and warnings in the even viewer, but see nothing of note. I tried installing some tracer software such as processmonitor - but the output is so large it is of no use to me. I can reach the explorer.exe via the task manager even with the blank screen, but stopping and re-starting the explorer.exe does not help.

If anyone knows a solution, I'd love to hear it.
Otherwise, if you know a good methodology to track down the culprit, I'd love to hear it.

thanks.

PogMoThoin

You sure Windows XP drivers were available for the laptop. Did you install them? Sounds like you've not got the chipset driver installed. Any yellow warnings beside devices in device manager?

yoyo

Run a chkdsk scan on the hard drive and see if it reports any issues. Sounds to me like a possible hd problem

Nick

alles

Yoyo and PogMoThoin,

thanks for taking the trouble to reply.

I have checked for device conflicts, driver updates etc and that is all fine.

I have run chkdsk on the drives, and the first time after that it booted up in record time, (i.e. able to work on PC within about 30secs of loggign in, compared to about 2-3mins normally) but then the same old behaviour happed again on shut down, and the next log in was slow again.

I would be grateful if anyone else had any ideas.

I forgot to mention..it is a dual boot system with Ubuntu linux, and that all works fine (mostly...!) - I don't imagine that plays a part in it? I have had dual boot machines before with no issues.

alles.

D'Agger

alles wrote: »

Yoyo and PogMoThoin,

thanks for taking the trouble to reply.

I have checked for device conflicts, driver updates etc and that is all fine.

I have run chkdsk on the drives, and the first time after that it booted up in record time, (i.e. able to work on PC within about 30secs of loggign in, compared to about 2-3mins normally) but then the same old behaviour happed again on shut down, and the next log in was slow again.

I would be grateful if anyone else had any ideas.

I forgot to mention..it is a dual boot system with Ubuntu linux, and that all works fine (mostly...!) - I don't imagine that plays a part in it? I have had dual boot machines before with no issues.

alles.

One suggestion I would give would be to boot from your xp installation disk if you still have it and run a repair of your install.

If possible, perhaps reinstall XP on the machine.

Are you seeing many application or system errors in the event viewer?

alles

D'agger,

thanks for that.
Yes, I have the disks. I will try the repair option maybe, some day soon when I I can give it a half day or so. I am not keen to re-install for fear that I will have to start from scratch with it. The behavior I get now is annoying, but not show-stopping.

I have checked the event viewer again - the main thing that occurs regularly and most days is a warning for the plug and play, saying:

"Timed out sending notification of device interface change to window of "\??\C:\WINDOWS\system32\winlogon.exe"
(id: 256)

Evidently, this is related to USB and might be a pointer towards the USB things that go on, but I ma not even sure how best to approach it...

alles

Monkeynut

the only real advise i could give is, it worked perfect after installation then you installed "a load" of programs,
i would take one of them as the culprits.
best thing would most likely be to uninstall one by one, eliminating each one as you uninstall. remember reboot after each program uninstallation.

p.s. you talked about usb, why not disconnect printers, camera etc got to do with usb and see if the machine boots up and shuts down good. before uninstalling programs.