Windows Drive Foundation service SLOWING startup

Hello.

Upgraded to an SSD drive a month or so back (love it!) and have been thrilled with my boot-up times. Since I installed it, once I type in my user password, the "Welcome" screen appears for only about 1 second, and I am instantly at my desktop with all processes and services loaded and I can immediately start launching programs and working.... until recently.

Within the past week or so, I noticed that once I typed in my password, the Windows 7 "Welcome" message would no longer almost instantly disappear, but instead would now linger for about 20-30 seconds all the while the blue "busy" circle spinning away. Eventually my desktop would appear and all was back to normal.

I finally got tired of it and decided to selective boot to narrow down the problem. Eventually I have traced it to the service "Windows Driver Foundation - User-mode Driver Framework". If I disable this service on boot-up, I'm back to my insta-boot situation.

Any ideas how to tackle this issue? Right now I have this off during bootup, but am unsure whether or not this is a bad workaround.

Any help appreciated.

Thanks!

Paul

I would treat it like I would with any boot delay issue, meaning that since the WFUDHOST is an essential Windows service, I would let it run and try to find what is causing it to act abnormally. This would mean returning to your selective boot procedure and disabling all of the item on the Startup Tab and see if that service quiets down. If it does, I would go back to the Startup Tab an reenable those items one at a time, until the problem reoccurs. That should pinpoint the underlying problem. If you have already done this, and WFUD is still the only item that seems to solve it, I would change the focus to drivers, rather than startup software. This can be somewhat more time consuming, but since the problem didn't occur until recently, I would try to remember if there had been any driver installed or updated about the time of the onset of the issue.

Failing that, it becomes a longer trek. There are online driver scanners, but I have never felt very comfortable with them, so my mind would tend to explore every possibility that I could think of. This may be why you are posting your question, and I wish I had a more solid answer, but that is life in the cyber world.

EDIT: You could circumvent all of the above, if you have a restore point conveniently located on the calendar and go back to it.

seekermeister said:

I would treat it like I would with any boot delay issue, meaning that since the WFUDHOST is an essential Windows service, I would let it run and try to find what is causing it to act abnormally. This would mean returning to your selective boot procedure and disabling all of the item on the Startup Tab and see if that service quiets down. If it does, I would go back to the Startup Tab an reenable those items one at a time, until the problem reoccurs. That should pinpoint the underlying problem. If you have already done this, and WFUD is still the only item that seems to solve it, I would change the focus to drivers, rather than startup software. This can be somewhat more time consuming, but since the problem didn't occur until recently, I would try to remember if there had been any driver installed or updated about the time of the onset of the issue.

Failing that, it becomes a longer trek. There are online driver scanners, but I have never felt very comfortable with them, so my mind would tend to explore every possibility that I could think of. This may be why you are posting your question, and I wish I had a more solid answer, but that is life in the cyber world.

EDIT: You could circumvent all of the above, if you have a restore point conveniently located on the calendar and go back to it.

Ok... thanks for the advice.

So.... after much trial and error, I found that the service that is causing the WFUD to cause the long boot time is the Shell Hardware Detection.

Thus, if I have them both on, I get the long boots. Shut either one of them off and no problems.

Any thoughts? :)

On Vista I disabled the Driver Foundation permanently. It gave me all kinds of problems. On win7 it seems to be OK.