Strange startup behavior

[red454]

For the last few weeks, my morning startup has been hit or miss.
Right after the blue Welcome screen, the desktop shows up and starts to populate with all the icons, then I will hear the Windows error bump sound, two or three times. I have a CPU monitor program and an ASUS GPU Tweak program that are set to start at boot, and I know if I don't see them load in the first few seconds of the desktop load, then I am done.

Any icons I click on, nothing happens. The icons in the task bar at the bottom will try to start when I click them, and sometimes the loading screen (for Outlook, Excel, Word) will start, but then nothing. Sometimes the Start button is accessible, sometimes not. The behavior at this point is not consistent. Sometimes there is an error message that the programs are no longer there and do I want to delete the icon.

I can always cntrl-alt-delete and then shut down or restart. Sometimes Task Manager is accessible, sometimes nothing happens when I try to get to it.

I have disabled most of the stuff in MSCONFIG. No change. In the BIOS I disabled the wifi and bluetooth, because sometimes there was an error that they did not load / start properly.

Then after a reboot or two, everything starts and functions just fine and is rock-solid. I never get a BSOD.

I have tried going back a driver rev or two for my Nvidia GTX 670. No change.

Starting in Safe Mode seems to be ok. No issues.

Is there some sort of event viewer I can look at to see what is happening (or not happening) at startup?


System:

Win 7 Ultimate 64
ASUS Maximus V Formuls
3770K
Corsair Neutron GTX 240

 

[MilesAhead]

I have a CPU monitor program and an ASUS GPU Tweak program that are set to start at boot, and I know if I don't see them load in the first few seconds of the desktop load, then I am done.

Have you tried starting these manually after the system is stable? Low level hw access while the system is coming up might confuse it.

If that gets nowhere try enabling Boot Logging in msconfig. I believe the boot log will be C:\Windows\ntbtlog.txt

 

[red454]

I haven't tried the manual start yet. I will say that the system has run fine for close to a year with no problems. I will look into the boot logging too - thanks.