Windows hangs at Icon screen.

Hello Everybody, I have WinXP Home+SP2 + AOL. The following issue
began a few weeks ago only occasionally. I could cure it by rebooting
once. Today the System refused to boot six times, though finally I got
it to boot in Safe Mode.
Windows hangs at the Icon screen: the placeholders are all there, the
music tinkles, but no icons appear. Nothing will work and there are no
error messages.
The Event System log shows several problems: (1) at each bootup the
specified path for AOL Spyware Protection cannot be found (Error 7000);
(2) Errors 17 and 29 - no time service was available to NtpClient, "A
socket operation was attempted to an unreachable host." (I have no idea
what this means.) The Event Application log shows that "An Internet
Connection was not detected" while trying to perform Live Update. (But
this may not be relevant. AOL never has started up at Windows bootup.)
Oddly, although some applications do start up, none are visible on Task
Manager when the system hangs.
I will be very grateful for any help here. I'm always having trouble
with AOL not logging on; I KNOW I should get rid of it, but we don't
have many good ISPs here in the UK and winkling out every cancerous
particle of AOL is a daunting prospect for a non-professional.
As always, thanks for any information offered.
Robert.

Hi Robert

I had a similar problem with a PC I was looking at a few weeks ago, I found
that the problem was down to a set of bad blocks on the hard disk, so might
be worth doing a scandisk once you have managed to start the PC in safe mode,
also check the event viewer for any DISK events although I didn't see any of
these despite the disk being faulty.

Only way I managed to get around this was to reload Windows XP over the top
of my original installation but make sure you back up any documents first as
it can be a bit risky and you never quite know the outcome.

Gary
MCP

"Robert" wrote:

Hello Everybody, I have WinXP Home+SP2 + AOL. The following issue
began a few weeks ago only occasionally. I could cure it by rebooting
once. Today the System refused to boot six times, though finally I got
it to boot in Safe Mode.
Windows hangs at the Icon screen: the placeholders are all there, the
music tinkles, but no icons appear. Nothing will work and there are no
error messages.
The Event System log shows several problems: (1) at each bootup the
specified path for AOL Spyware Protection cannot be found (Error 7000);
(2) Errors 17 and 29 - no time service was available to NtpClient, "A
socket operation was attempted to an unreachable host." (I have no idea
what this means.) The Event Application log shows that "An Internet
Connection was not detected" while trying to perform Live Update. (But
this may not be relevant. AOL never has started up at Windows bootup.)
Oddly, although some applications do start up, none are visible on Task
Manager when the system hangs.
I will be very grateful for any help here. I'm always having trouble
with AOL not logging on; I KNOW I should get rid of it, but we don't
have many good ISPs here in the UK and winkling out every cancerous
particle of AOL is a daunting prospect for a non-professional.
As always, thanks for any information offered.
Robert.

Hello Gary, Thank you for your welcome response - I was beginning to
wonder if I would ever get one. I'll certainly take your advice re.
the Scandisk, but I think I have solved the problem although one must
not speak too soon. Let me explain. I have a few extra utilities on
my machine one of which is a Windows Clipboard extension which collects
clips and stores them. It usually runs in the background and it is set
to start at Windows bootup. I forgot to shut it down before turning off
the PC. Shutting down with an application running is never a good idea,
and it seems that this utility did not start up after such an affront -
with the result that you know. Now I have withdrawn its startup status
and, hey presto!, Windows starts up normally (for the present, anyway.)
No, I didn't notice any disk events in the Event Viewer either -
mercifully. I should hate to have to reinstall as you did.
Thanks again for your suggestions. It was kind of you to take the
trouble.
Best Wishes,
Robert.

GCB wrote:
Hi Robert

I had a similar problem with a PC I was looking at a few weeks ago, I found
that the problem was down to a set of bad blocks on the hard disk, so might
be worth doing a scandisk once you have managed to start the PC in safe mode,
also check the event viewer for any DISK events although I didn't see any of
these despite the disk being faulty.

Only way I managed to get around this was to reload Windows XP over the top
of my original installation but make sure you back up any documents first as
it can be a bit risky and you never quite know the outcome.

Gary
MCP