[gtrman79]

Hello. This is my first post so here it goes. The other day I reformatted my computer just so I could start fresh and also so I could put a partition for my music, pics, and other downloads. I have XP Home. Well, when I did this, now I have a long pause on startup. It will sit at the desktop with no task bar. But I can CTRL-ALT-DEL to bring up my task manager and the mouse works. It is like its hanging up on explorer. I have tried disabling all my startup items. It will still sit for about a minute. Then everything will eventually come up. And it wasn't right away. It was after I was reinstalling all my programs. After I reinstalled a few of them, I would restart if it asked. It booted up fine for a while. But then it started hanging up and I don't remember which software I was on when it did this.

Is there a step by step way of loading Windows to find what program is actually hanging up?

Also I ran Spybot and Ad-Aware and they found nothing but a couple harmless cookies. I have not tried running through the list of items on the how-to-removal. I thought I would post this first.

Oh and here are my specs

P4 Prescott 2.8 GHZ
1 gig PC3200 RAM
80 G HD (30/50 partition)
Liteon DVD-RW
Samsung CD-RW
GeForce 5700LE
Windows XP Home
AVG Free Virus
Zone Alarm Firewall
(Did I miss anything?)

Thanks for any help. Other than the startup, the machine runs much better after the format. It was sluggish due to much downloaded crap.

OOPS! I just realized this is in the wrong forum. I meant to put this in the Windows XP section.

Edited by gtrman79, 14 December 2006 - 06:16 PM.

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[gtrman79]

Actually, I reformatted twice because I thought I did something wrong the first time. And it still did it. It doesn't happen right away. But after I start reinstalling programs. I even defragged and ran a Tune-Up Utility demo. Still does it. I will check on all drivers. They might not ALL be up to date. I know my Video and Sound are.

[gtrman79]

OK, the drivers were up to date. I ran Panda scan and it found only some cookies in my Mozilla profiles folder. I cleared them. I will try Spybot and Adaware to see what they find. If that doesnt help what else can I try? I will do some more searching in the forums for other things.

[gtrman79]

OK. Now I removed my Zone Alarm. And now my taskbar and everything comes up on startup. But...when i look at my task manager, my name does not appear under the user column. Actually the whole column is blank. No system or anything. Just the system Idle which is at 99. It finally comes after the same amount of time as before when it was hanging up. So I guess it still is hanging up but now I can get to my taskbar and run a program if I want. But it is very slow until it finally "comes alive" from its hang up.

Now I have tried to watch the task manager for different process that come up right when the hang up ends. I think I have found 3 that pop up and then the computer is fine. They are:

alg.exe
imapi.exe
wmiprvse.exe

And I think the imapi goes away right away. The alg stays open. And the wmiprvse goes away. I tried clearing the prefetch and restarting. Didn't help.

So can I safely do anything with these 3 processes without messing up windows?

Or are one of these processes a virus or malware??

Thanks for the help!

(Edit)

OK. I got it. It was the imapi that was hanging up. I was able to uninstall the service and reinstall. Now it works fine.

Edited by gtrman79, 17 December 2006 - 09:12 PM.