Slow boot past few days. Help with trace please?

[martinlest]

[FONT=&quot]Hi. I am hoping someone would be kind enough to help me with a slow boot issue that suddenly started a couple of days back. I can't connect it with anything I did at the time with the PC, installation-wise or whatever... There was a power outage in my area for a few seconds, but I have a pure sine wave UPS connected and the PC didn't even flicker...

Normally, a reboot takes about 40 secs. It is now taking about 2 minutes. What happens is that the Welcome screen appears and, instead of lasting a few seconds, sits there for about 20 seconds. Then, the monitor goes black for 30 secs. or so, before coming back on and then, as far as I can see, things seem OK, the boot concludes. No shutdown delays.

I did a clean reboot, no non-Windows services, and thought I had fixed the problem, as the reboot was normal: Intel Update Manager seemed to be the culprit in the end. But a few boots later, the issue returned, though that service was still disabled. Same thing when I did a System Restore back to a point before the boot problem showed itself. At first that seemed to fix it, but after a few boots, the problem was back. I have run diagnostics on the CPU, SSDs and memory (MemTest86, several runs) but can't see any hardware issues.

So I have just done a boot trace, as per the thread here ("Gathering a Startup, Shutdown, Sleep, Hibernate, or Reboot Trace.htm"). The etl file is 1.25GBs (!!): I have uploaded it here, nonetheless:[/FONT]

MEGA

[FONT=&quot]I hope the trace is OK - I got a message saying 'delaying for pre-shutdown trace 290 seconds'. When that time had elapsed, nothing happened - I rebooted the PC manually anyway (?).

It looks as if the data is all there but I cannot interpret it myself. (Is Windows Session manager an issue?), so I'd really appreciate some help in doing so. (Does Cluberti sill generously offer up his time to help with these things?).

Windows7 x64 CPU=i7-4790K@4GHz, 16GB RAM

Many thanks!

Martin[/FONT]

 

[Mellon Head]

Martin,

Are you using MalwareBytes Anti-Exploit? Or MalwareBytes Anti-Ransomware? Both have been "updated" to a deactivated state and are now causing long boot times with no warning. Just yesterday I had to disable both my Anti-Exploit and Anti-Ransomware because I was suddenly running into a 2 minute boot time for no reason at all.

If you aren't using these products, then there must be something else causing the slowdown. I'm no good at reading trace files, but I'm sure that someone will happen along that can.

 

[Megahertz07]

It can be a corrupted file.
Do a System file check - Run sfc /scannow
Schedule a disk check - Run chkdsk c: /f

 

[martinlest]

Are you using MalwareBytes Anti-Exploit? Or MalwareBytes Anti-Ransomware?

Good idea! I was - and was testing the shutdown problem with the developper. It wasn't solved, so I uninstalled the software a couple of weeks back. The odd boot behaviour now is different from the boot problems I had with MAB.

Do a System file check - Run sfc /scannow
Schedule a disk check - Run chkdsk c: /f

I've done both since I posted here: SFC found some errors, which it corrected, but it's made no difference to the boot problem. The errors were probaly due to my going back a couple of days more with System Restore. I'd run SFC yesterday and everything had came back as fine. Checkdisc found no errors.

Having gone back to an earlier System Restore point and disabled the Intel Update Manager again, the boot time is back to normal again.

But it's still not right: on some (not all: the PC goes through short periods when it boots quite normally: that only adds to the mystery) 'good' reboots (from a timing point of view, that is), the desktop, though it appears in good time (my usual 40 secs or so) is 'dead'. No shortcut works, my desktop gadgets are missing and the startup programmes I run automatically via batch files don't run either. Then, about 40 seconds later, everything comes alive, batch scripts run, gadets load, shortcuts work...

Thanks.