Solved Strange behavior on windows startup

[dat white]

Hello.
Since about two days I have been experiencing a strange windows behavior while starting the system.
When powering the PC up, it goes through the post operations fine.
Then, it gets to the windows loading screen, the one with the colored lights orbiting.

The problem is that, when the logon screen should light up, i get a black screen. The display acts like it hasn't got an input signal (switching between digital and analog several times, then powering down; power led blinking).

The system stays in this state for about 90-100 seconds, then the logon screen appears and everything works fine.

I was wondering if I need to start worrying about some hardware which may be failing, or if it is something in the windows startup process that is creating trouble.

I can say that I went through the event logs, and there are no errors. In the system ones, there is only a strangely long time (abt two mins) between the kernel-cpu events and the "plug and play service running" one. The nvidia display driver seems to be working fine.

Any suggestions?
Thanks,
Mark

 

[Diosoth]

Did you make any changes to Windows lately? New Updates or any new program installs? PCs tend to get bloated over time- mine is similar in that W7 takes about 3-5 minutes to boot now due to bloat and age(my XP computer takes less than 30 seconds to boot)

Might not hurt to run a test on your hard drive's health, in case sectors are going bad, plus some malware scans and maybe some RAN tests. Go through your startup processes and see if anything new/unusual has been added lately.

 

[dat white]

I always have kept the os updated, with the policy by which I get alerted when an update is available and then I can choose to install it. Anyway, all the updates from ms are installed. Moreover, it's a relatively new os installation, I had done a complete re-install about one month ago after plugging some new hardware (in-fact, I reinstalled windows but it wasn't strictly necessary, since the new hardware is the chassis and the cpu cooler).

Before this event, the boot was very quick, more or less like your xp rig. I may add, that I never experienced this kind of thing, with basically the entire system hanging up to two minutes.

In regards to installed software, I did no changes since abt a week ago, when I was trying out some freeware personal firewalls (I 've been using comodo for years, yet I'm beginning to dislike it of late - so was looking for alternatives), but in the end I kept the one I already have.

The only thing I suspect could have done something, is that the night before trouble started, I had disconnected the pc from the power mains and from the router (there was a thunderstorm and in the past in two different cases I've had a motherboard and a
dsl modem killed by lightning hitting nearby the place I live).
So the following day, I reconnected the pc to power and network and the described problem started.

Could it be something related to USB devices? (the connection to the router is through an USB network adapter, no lan card/chip on this rig)
Can I exclude display issues?

I'll be checking the system HD for errors with a specialized app, but I had already performed chkdsk and it returned no errors.
I also already performed malware checks and it's clean. Running processes and services are all good, no strange things appear (Process Explorer)

 

[dat white]

bump.. anybody can help? I went through the advice Diosoth provided, but found nothing suspicious

 

[dat white]

strange, but after disconnecting the monitor and reconnecting it it rebooted fine.
thx.