Member Avatar for UNE

A friend of mine has a P-IV PC and has XP prof installed but every time he starts it, it boots properly up to the point of "loading personal settings" and then freezes up.. what could the problem be.. i have tried defragmenting, scandisk but didn’t do any good..

He says that when he bough it it was OK but it started doing so after some time,

I wanted to install SP2 do you think tha by doing so i can fix the problem or is there any other solution..

Its computer is:

PIV 2.4Mhz

512RAM

120HDD

etc..

he has no internet connection.. he also has McAfee anti-virus program

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Dani AI

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Symptom: Windows XP Pro hangs at "Loading personal settings" after the Welcome screen and only continues after pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del. has already tried Disk tools, msconfig startup changes and installing SP2; and suggested Safe Mode and a new profile. The freeze at that exact point usually means something in the logon sequence (profile load, userinit/winlogon, logon scripts, AV or shell extensions) is blocking interactive logon rather than a pure disk or driver problem.

Practical diagnostic checklist (do these in order and keep backups of data/registry before edits):

  • Check Event Viewer (System and Application) for errors or warnings at boot time from Userenv / User Profile Service / Winlogon — these point to profile or script problems.
  • Capture what actually stalls during logon with Sysinternals Process Monitor (enable boot logging). The trace will show which file/registry access waits longest during the "Loading personal settings" phase.
  • Use Autoruns (Sysinternals) to disable third‑party shell extensions and non-Microsoft startup items and services that msconfig may miss. Pay attention to anything that hooks into winlogon or explorer.exe.
  • Inspect services (run services.msc or use msconfig → Services with "Hide Microsoft services") and temporarily disable McAfee services to test the effect — AV on-access hooks commonly delay profile load.
  • Verify Winlogon registry values at HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon: Userinit should point to C:\WINDOWS\system32\userinit.exe and Shell to explorer.exe. Back up the registry before changing anything.
  • If Event Viewer shows profile load failures, check HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList for corrupted or .bak SIDs, back up the NTUSER.DAT file from the profile and rebuild the profile if necessary.
  • Run system file check from an elevated command prompt if system files are suspected:
sfc /scannow

If these steps don’t locate the culprit, a clean remove of the AV (use vendor removal tool) or an in-place repair install of XP (after backing up data) are reasonable last resorts. The fact that Ctrl+Alt+Del clears the hang strongly suggests a third‑party component intercepting the secure attention sequence (AV, GINA/credential providers, or shell hooks), so focus tracing on modules loaded into the logon path.

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Member Avatar for lloyd

do yu mean the computer can not start?
have you try the "last known good configration" model to start it?
if it works, then use the restore feature of the xp.
otherwise use the safe model to start it , then creat a new user, start it again and log in as the new user.

Member Avatar for UNE

Yes it restarts...
it displys welcome screen and when it comes to the next stage of "loading personal settings" it freezes up and thyen to carry on you have i press ctrl+alt+del then it starts normally.. and i have disable all startup applications from MSCONFIG and install SP2 but stil it is doing the same thing.

Member Avatar for DMR

As lloyd suggested, can you boot into Safe Mode or Safe Mode with Networking? If so, does the system seem stable in those modes?

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