Post by FreepleIsn't there some application that will show what is being loaded by
windows. Even one that will show what is loading during and after the
desktop first appears.
I wold like to know why it takes so long for apps to run after the
desktop first appears.
A little while later, maybe two minutes, the apps respond quickly.
Does Nirsoft or someone have something that will watch what is going on ?
Posting this to two groups was a bad idea, because
the answer is different for each group.
On WinXP, BootVis was demonstrated here on my SP3 setup,
to work, and show some information about the boot sequence.
On a later OS, XBootMgr/XPerf or WPA, might be used to
collect the same sort of information as BootVis. Except
BootVis was a consumer-friendly approach to doing it. Using
WPA is extreme overkill, as the default configuration takes
around 2 hours to run, and is completely pointless. XBootMgr
will only cost one reboot, by comparison.
Another way to collect a boot trace, is with ProcMon
from Sysinternals. And the neat thing is, you can even
have a trace running during system shutdown, and ProcMon
keeps files during the shutdown, as well as collecting
a separate trace during startup. The trace files could take a gigabyte
of hard drive space. After the reboot, when you run ProcMon,
that terminates the trace, so you should only start ProcMon,
when you think all the symptoms have been collected in the
trace. (Like, wait until you've successfully run an app
after the reboot, as proof the symptomatic behavior will
be contained in the boot trace.)
Procmon doesn't always work though.
Procmon does stuff line inject "procmon23.dll" as
a hidden file, into your OS folder. That's part of how
it can be doing stuff when it isn't running. That file
plays some part in it. A number of times, I've seen ProcMon
"do nothing" on a reboot, as if that injected DLL didn't
work out for some reason. Procmon does not remove the
file, either!
*******
The only strange behavior I've seen on WinXP, is with
regard to the Firewall, and .NET patches. After a .NET
patch installs, "ngen.exe" is supposed to run and
recompile .NET assemblies and put them in an assembly
cache. Sometimes, network related things won't start,
because they're waiting for ngen.exe to compile the
Firewall code.
This is an example of a fix for that. You locate the
highest version of .NET on the machine, and execute
the ngen.exe in there with "executequeueditems" as
the passed argument. That's supposed to get ngen.exe
to finish what it's supposed to be doing, so that on
the next boot, there should be no delay for the Firewall
code to load and run.
C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\ngen.exe executequeueditems
ECHO Microsoft .NET Framework 4 Startup Fix for WinXP
Other than that, I would not have "high expectations"
about BootVis or any of the other methods, to tell you
a damn thing. My batting average on finding "culprits"
is poor. And part of that, is the lack of visibility
on what SVCHOSTs are doing. They're a detriment to debugging.
Paul