Troubleshooting an XP bootup lockup

[Steven Avery]

Hi Folks,

This is a relaxed problem. (Thus I prefer to discuss it here .. rather than in any of the hyper-ventilated forums.)

When I boot up XP under the main user, I get a lockup, hourglass, active, no keyboard or mouse actions allowed, perhaps relating to Internet Explorer. (After a couple of programs like Avira and NoteZilla have loaded, but most have not.) When I crash out Windows Explorer with my task manager (ctrl-alt delete is not disabled, my task manager replacement DTaskManager, comes up and is fully functional) the system can be normal, ready for me to start up the rest of the programs by hand. (A couple have started up by the time of the lockup.)  There is no residue of difficulty in that case.

I saw in the "weird window" thread the suggestion to stop a bunch of stuff from starting up in Autoruns and then put back in groups.  Sounds like a good idea, I was also wondering about checking the event log, or a load order program and stuff like that.  This stuff is squirrelly.  The Autoruns  suggestion is probably a good idea, any thing to go along with that ?  I usually do not reboot that frequently so I have to dedicate some time to this when I am doing other stuff in multi-task. HijackThis style logs is a possibility too.

=====================================

Here are a couple of other notes.

Paragon's freebie would not install without "administrator" rights, even though my main user is an administrator.  No other new programs have had this problem.  So I eventually bit the bullet and did ctrl-alt-delete twice at signon, went in as the official administrator, and install went fine.  Any thoughts ?  This was different than when this type of problem happens and you actually do not have administrator rights.  Maybe I will write Paragon, since they are known for high-class customer service.  The problem is .. I don't have a problem anymore.

I also have some XP questions (on another puter or 2) similar to the ones in the "weird window" thread.  These XPs have the right # on the side, almost surely original motherboard,  and the guy gets them from a solid corporation and has to reinstall the OS. (Total investment for 2 puters = $175 and 1 might just become a Linux box anyway and the fellow will help me get them up, if I catch him at the right time.)  At one time I think I had XP validated on one but smashed it with an attempted partition.  (Ugh). So all this adventure is in process... stay tuned.  Again, these are secondary puters, there is no rush, but a lot of the issues overlap the "weird window" thread.  In general, if you have a high-class OEM-style wide-mouth Windows XP installer and an original system with the right sticker # on the side, should you have much problem getting XP back up, do you thunk ?

Shalom,
Steven

[Shades]

Checking the event log when problems occur in your system is always a smart thing to do. Also, when you experience unexpected behavior from your machine, check also the size from all available event viewers in your system (normally those are: Application, System, Security).

WinXP pro sets those values by default to 512Kbyte and when those event logs are full, your computer will start to behave unexpectedly. A cleaning option is available through the context menu (right click) and is also a smart thing to do. It is also possible to expand the size of these event loggers, but if your computer is not running critical applications that should not be necessary.


On the second part of your question (getting WinXP up again) the answer will be no.

Why? Licenses do not transfer. Although the hardware and license are correctly matched, the license holder is...well,  not you. Expect problems (re-)activating WinXP through Microsoft when that is necessary.

[Steven Avery]

Hi Folks,

  I did learn a bit about the hardware activation.  

  If you have a puter than is native XP and you have the 25-digit Windows number (eg. a sticker on the puter) and the puter hasn't changed much, the WGA activation can go through fine, simply puter to net to MS and back, no discussions.  Granted this may require a special-OEM-style XP install CD, or maybe not. And I dunno what would happen if the earlier owner reports a sale or box-separation-anxiety to Microsoft (e.g. an enterprise that junks en masse 100 3-yr old PC's to a middle-man when they get the latest and greatest).  

  Along a smilar line of inquiry, twice when I bought a Dell from somebody, Dell took the transfer info for warranty without bothering anybody about "another XP".  Now they don't have a requirement to be the MS gendarme on used box OS, so that does not say exactly what is technically allowed or permitted.  And Microsoft could look at personal transfers differently than middle-man xfers, especially if it comes down to an activation conversation.

  Another point of interest.  If you want to do the updates to SP3 without triggering WGA (Windows Genuine Advantage, their method of trying to control the OS turf) it seems that that is doable through a special IT prof/network download on the MS site. However everytime there is another update, there is a potential trigger/snare, and I dunno if you would stop at SP3 or if Microsoft continues with similar sidesteps that you track down.  And if you trigger the WGA (necessary for automatic updating, for better or worse) you might want to be fairly confident the registration is going to go through fine. And/or you might want to have a nice pre-trigger image or you might want to downgrade to MS 2000 or side/upgrade to Linux Bells and Whistles.  The MS prodding is quite ugly on the XP puter.

Shalom,
Steven Avery

[4wd]

Regarding your Paragon wouldn't install episode, I'm not going to say it definitely was, but I'd say that you ran up against XP's ownership rights when it failed to install.

I've had this happen before, usually after I've had to reinstall the OS, where I am an administrator but I could not run/open something because I didn't 'own' it - even though I did before the reinstall under the same username.

I now use this tweak when I reinstall which makes the Administrators group the owner of files instead of individual accounts, (it's only a single user machine so I don't consider it a problem):

[Select]

; Make the Administartors group the owner of files instead of the individual Administrator account.
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa]
"nodefaultadminowner"=dword:00000000

Addendum: If you do DIR /Q in the directory it will list files along with the owner.