Win 7 start up problem

G'day,

Recently I have been having some problems with both booting up and shutting down my system. On start-up, the rig appears to boot normally but when trying to open the first program of the day it will hang and take up to 5 minutes to finally open the program. I always start with Windows Live Mail. After that, everything seems to run perfectly until trying to shut down. On clicking "shut-down" the desktop closes and the screen goes to the blue "Shutting Down" screen with the progress wheel spinning. It hangs again and refuses to shut down. I let it run overnight and this morning I had to turn the power off to get it to shut down and reboot. Would anyone have any suggestions as to what I can do to fix this? I defrag on a regular basis and have not had any crashes or problems until now. All help wil be greatly appreciated. I'm using Win 7 Home Premium 64 bit. Thanks for your consideration.

Cheers,
Fritz

What happens if you open, say...... internet explorer 1st.

Hey, AddRam,

Thanks for your response. I should have said that I have tried begining with something else. No matter what is chosen as the "first click of the day", it always behaves as described above.

Cheers,
Fritz

I would try a quick system restore to a few days or weeks back. That should fix it.

I tried that. No luck.

Cheers,
Fritz

Hello,

Your antivirus software or firewall may be blocking the program to open. Can you turn it off and try again? And did the two problem occur at the same time? I mean do you know whether the shutdown and first program problem started at different times or not. If they started at the same time, you can search the event viewer and maybe you will find something in there.

About shutdown problem, I have more information because I experienced a similar problem to yours. My computer could shut down, but in 2-3 minutes. This is my thread about this problem:
Can you give me some information about shut down

If you don't want to read all of them, this tutorial can help you:
Gathering a Startup, Shutdown, Sleep, Hibernate, or Reboot Trace

It creates a shutdown trace and this trace includes almost everything happened during the shutting down process. It even didn't solve my problem, only I reduced the shutting down time by 1 minutes. Nevertheless, this program can help you. After you took the trace, upload it and we can see what causes the problem. I know you can't shut down without turning the power off, but I think if you wait for 10 minutes, then turn the power off, you can take a normal shutdown trace.

I'm not an expert of this matter, but cluberti (Windows 7 Forums - View Profile: cluberti) can help you more.

Hey, Epokhe,

Thanks much, I didn't think about the antivirius program causing the trouble. Those programs do get updated all the time and perhaps that could be it, as both the startup and shutdown problems began on the same day. I will have a look at all the things that you have suggested and give them a try. Thanks again, mate. Appreciate it.

Cheers,
Fritz