Hoping someone can help......
I'm running Windows 2000 on a PIII 930 machine with 1/2 gig RAM and 40 gig HD. Suddenly it is taking an extraordinarily long time for Windows to startup. I have not installed any new programs or anything like that.
This is what happens......
Switch on computer, and when Windows gets to the "Establishing Network Connections" screen, it would freeze for several minutes at a time but eventually it gets going again and I come to the Login screen. I'm not on a network and this is a single user system so I hit Enter as I usually do.
As Windows continues to start up, there are intermittent freezing. Then when it gets to the point where the background image loads up and the task bar appears but BEFORE any of the startup programs loads up, the system freezes and I cannot move the mouse. However after several minutes, it unfreezes and continue to boot. It loads up the first two icons in the task bar (ie "Unplug or Eject Hardware" and "Volume") before it freezes again for several minutes. Then it proceeds to load the rest of the icons, sometimes freezing at different other points but other times loading them up straight away.
By the time I reach the point where everything is loaded, it is anywhere between 20 minutes and over 30 minutes. Previously it would be only about 5 minutes.
Furthermore, the system occasionally freezes for several minutes especially when accessing the disk drives or loading a program (appears to be no pattern as to which program and it is intermittent) but once again the system gets going again eventually.
I'm not sure if this is related, but around the time this started happening the system came up with an error that "updcustom.dll.log" is corrupted and it rebooted itself. When it rebooted, it automatically did a scan of the hard disk and according to the system it had automatically fixed the problem with the "updcustom.dll".
Many thanks for your help
Gregga