Weird Problem. Desktop icons don't show up for 3-5 minutes

kantonburg

Platinum Member
Oct 10, 1999
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This just started today. When I bootup using Win2k Pro my desktop icons take literally 3-5 minutes to show up then everything works fine. Until then I can't open IE or even rightclick on the desktop.

I haven't changed any settings that I know of and everything is as it was several days ago so??

Any ideas?

thanks
 

ProviaFan

Lifer
Mar 17, 2001
14,993
1
0
Do you have a virus scanner? Is it up to date on virus definitions? Open up the task manager and see if you find anything unusual in the process list. Switch over to the performance tab and check out the memory usage...does it look normal?
 

kantonburg

Platinum Member
Oct 10, 1999
2,975
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Yea and it's up to date. I use AVG and it runs nightly at 2:00am.

It's so weird. After like 3-5 minutes everything works just fine. Like it has to "warm" up :D annoying though
 

DasMan2

Golden Member
Jul 6, 2002
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This may or may not be somewhat related, I had a person with a computer issue using Win ME that would get stuck at load up right when the splash screen(Win ME) came up and get stuck there.
I was able to get past that by smple pressing "Enter" and or "Esc" with a 10 second count between the two which allowed the computer to show the Dos screen of "computer continuing to load files" and continued normal loading and operation to desktop.
Maybe you could try that simple effort in your case to see if that Can unlock the seemingly extra long "Stall" to get your system responding normally to finish loading to get to full desktop access.

The computer needed major maintenance in "Scandisking " +"Diskdefrag", which then afterward proved the general cure to the otherwise sluggish performance. The system only had 64 megs ram and a Duron 700 Mhz which later turned generally snappy to imput responses.

Now I thought maybe the virus checker would find something ,but I stopped it after it ran through 30,000 +files and fiqured this machine was simply overloaded as I quit running the 15+ programs running in the background and that maybe the system resources were at a limit. Could you state your system memory and how many programs you have running in the background as many there is a common simularity here?
 

kantonburg

Platinum Member
Oct 10, 1999
2,975
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I narrowed it down the the 2nd NIC in my PC used for ICS in win2k. I disabled it and everything works fine. Enable it and it goes back to stalling? It's weird I need the 2nd nic so now I have to figure out how to fix it.
 

MaestroQuark

Member
Oct 23, 2002
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0
61
First instinct is drivers. Bad drivers can mess anything up in a system (once I had my internet access freeze constantly - because of a Creative Labs sound chip).

Try going to the vendor's website and downloading the latest versions.
 

kantonburg

Platinum Member
Oct 10, 1999
2,975
1
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FIXED!!

I went to 3Com's site and downloaded their newest drivers which were older than the Microsoft drivers that came with Windows 2000. I changed to the other ones, rebooted and everything came up fine.

I guess I needed to use 3Com's instead. It was just nice putting the card in turning on the computer and having it recognize the NIC.

Thanks guys for the help.
 

MaestroQuark

Member
Oct 23, 2002
32
0
61
Yeah, sometimes the latest isn't the greatest. And I really don't trust Microsoft's 'modified' drivers much. I stick to the vendors, they know what they're doing most of the time.
 

DasMan2

Golden Member
Jul 6, 2002
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Kantonburg , good to read you have resolved the issue on your computer,I have heard about the sound chip problem before, but the 2nd NIC driver issue is new to me.

I may of thought that your FONT/Icon Cache memory allocation needed to be tweaked.
 

kantonburg

Platinum Member
Oct 10, 1999
2,975
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Yea this is probably the weirdest problem I've ever encountered especially on my personal PC. I "almost" went the way of technical troubleshooting but MaestroQuark quickly reminded me that it was probably something simple, as it is 99% of the time.

I had the same setup in my last year of college sharing a T1 line at school and I don't remember if I used MS or 3Com drivers then.