Installed Service Pack 3. Now Icons, Start Menu, etc. Take Forever to Load

[Stoney]

I wasn't sure if this belonged here or the laptop forum but this one seemed more logical...

I recently cloned my Windows XP Pro with SP2 from a failing Hitachi harddrive to a new Samsung HD in my Toshiba Tecra S1 laptop. Everything went smooth and the system immediately recognized the new harddrive. The transfer was perfect.


Then for some unknown reason about a week later I decided to upgrade to Service Pack 3. I've read where they got the kinks out. Hmmmm... Anyway, the first reboot afterwards loaded my background but that was it. No Icons, No Task Bar, No Start Menu was displayed. I had to do a hard shut-down and when I rebooted all screens loaded fine with all icons, etc.

Today I turned on the laptop and it loaded to the Windows screen and then my desktop with no icons, etc. to be seen. I shut down via power button and tried again. The same thing. Eventually the Icons, etc., loaded.

How do I rectify this problem? The boot up time is definitly quicker since upgrading from 512 megs of RAM to 2 Gigs and going from a 4200 rpm HD to a 5400 rpm. It is only when I get to the desktop that a full load fails to happen.

Thanks

[mjc]

Any drivers for currently uninstalled hardware still active? Like a network card? Any network shares that aren't currently being used? Printers? Time the delay...if it is 30 secs or a multiple (whole minutes) then this is very likely. You may also want to update certain drivers now that the SP has been installed.

All of those things can cause what you are experiencing...and installing the SP will tend to reset things if you have 'tweaked' them out without actually removing them.

Also, it resets the pre-fetch cache, which basically will mean until you reboot a few times and the cache starts to populate things will run slower at first.

Services may have been reset too, so if you 'tweaked' any of them...check them again.

Another thing, have you defragged after the install?

[PrntRhd]

Defrag definitely helped after SP3 install for 4 of my PCs.

[Stoney]

Yes, I did defrag after the install. Perhaps I'll see if a few more reboots fills the pre-fetch cache as noted. I can say I didn't tweak anything except I did disable the network wireless card that came with this laptop and went with a Belkin G adapter because the wireless was limited to a/b and no matter how I tried to connect it couldn't.

The final load between desktop screen is certainly several minutes but I have yet to time it.

Thanks for your responses.

[mjc]

Make sure the wireless is still disabled. One of the things that can take a long time is for Windows to 'time out' on loading/searching fro a driver for something that isn't really there.