Seven minutes between Welcome and wallpaper, then OK

Windows 7, Home Premium, 32-bit

I am a long-time Windows user and have a new problem neither I nor Microsoft Support, Level 2, can solve.

Windows starts quickly on boot up, I enter the password and get the blue welcome screen. This quickly goes to a black screen with a movable cursor, and sits there for about 7 minutes. At that point, the taskbar, icons and wallpaper then appear as expected and startup progresses normally. Once up and running, no more problems are observed. What is this 7-min hang all about?

I sense that the BIOS and motherboard are probably OK, since windows starts quickly and as expected, and that the problem is in the sequence immediately after windows starts. It is as though a scan or some other routine is running and we are waiting for it to finish. I can run multiple programs without any problem once I get past the start. So, this suggests that RAM is OK. The driver for the video card is up to date. I have tried a bare bones start from msconfig, and starting in Safe Mode. Neither changes the situation I have described. An antivirus scan, and checkdisk were unproductive. Does this ring a bell to anyone?

Ranger4 said:

How close to full is your Hard Drive?.

Have you De-fragmented the HDD recently, it might need doing.

The C: drive is 279GB with 46GB free space. A defrag makes no difference.

I think I have found the source of the problem but, as yet, not the solution. I have an external drive enclosure (Drobo Gen 1 - no longer supported). Prior to a recent reinstall of the OS, all was working fine. Now, this startup delay goes away if I take the Drobo out of the system. If I reattach it, the delay returns. I have reinstalled the Drobo dashboard software that I think acts as the driver (not sure), and am still playing with it.

Thank you to those who pitched in here. This was a tough one to solve, distinguishing between software and hardware problems.