Startup Problems, WinXP-Home, SP2

[Michael Wright]

I have a "generic" computer that was built by a local computer shop. It has
an Aseus motherboard with the nVidia integrated devices. I've got an AMD
1.80 Ghz processor, 512 MB RAM and of course the usual hard drives,
CD-BURNER, and DVD-ROM drive. I also have a ZIP drive connected via USB. The
computer was two years old in September. It originally had WinXP-Home, SP1.

Three weeks ago today my computer started doing something VERY strange. My
wife powered it on of a morning like she always does (we normally shut the
computer down at night). During boot-up, it hung with the opening Windows XP
screen...the screen where the little bar is moving across the screen. So, I
had my wife to boot into Safe Mode...and we ran Adaware, which found a few
items...took care of those...and the computer rebooted. I was relieved...

It lasted a day...2 days later...the problem happened again. This time, I
ran the WinXP Repair option. Again...the problem went away...and lasted 2
days. This same thing happened again...no kind of error message...no clue as
to the problem. It just hangs on that opening screen. I decided in this case
to apply SP2 and see what that would do. Well...it didn't help at all. It
hung in the same spot immediately after installing SP2.

At this point, I decided it was time to clean the hard drive off, do a fresh
install of Windows and also install the latest nVidia drivers. I decided I
would also install SP2. I did all of that just over 2 weeks ago. The
computer has been working great...everything seeming to be fine. No errors
with any of the devices...just nice bootups and shutdowns, etc., until...

This morning...out of the clear blue...the problem was back. The exact same
thing happened! No errors...no clues...no bootup. It booted up once and I
installed an update to my virus program and decided to reboot...and that is
where it hung.

This time...I decided to boot into the Safe Mode...uninstall the nVidia
package of drivers...and reinstall the nVidia package. This seemed to get it
back to a working state (I booted it up 2 or 3 times without problems).
However, I'm very frustrated and discouraged...and clueless on how to fix
this so it won't happen again.

Needless to say...the computer always shuts down fine...no kinds of errors
or hang ups that we know of. Even trying to boot into the "last good
configuration" mode always fails.

Any thoughts or ideas? Please e-mail me at (e-mail address removed).

Thanks in advance.

 

[Geddy Lee]

It sounds like your processor is overheating at start up. Getting a new fan
may do the trick. (At least that is what happened to me.) Maybe the
processor doesn't have enough paste between processor and the fan
block???!!! It is a difficult situation. That is my tip for you, if it is
any help.



Another little tip, don't be giving out your email address online here at
the forum. There are too many people out there who utilize it to send you
viruses left and right. Unfortunate but true. I had to dump one of my email
addresses because "someone" here at the forums, took my address and put me
onto a mailing list. Inside 24 hours I was bombarded with emails and virus
and trojans and every monster available online. And I know that it was from
the forum because they were all American ads; and I do not have anything to
do with American ads because I live in Germany. Hence, the problem came from
some unscrupulous person through the forum.



Make sure your virus scanner is up to date now that you have released your
email address to the public; it could get nasty now.

Good luck



GL





J



Take care

 

[Michael Wright]

One other tidbit...

Two days before all of this started I upgraded to a new version of
EZ-Antivirus...I wonder if something about this program could be causing all
of this grief?

Thanks.

 

[gls858]

Geddy Lee wrote:>

snip<
addresses because "someone" here at the forums, took my address and put me
onto a mailing list.
snip<

No one here put your address on a mailing list. The spammers have
programs that harvest e-mail addresses of the clueless from newsgroups.

gls858

 

[Mark L. Ferguson]

The Event Viewer in admin tools is the place to start for finding what is
causing the freeze. If no help, try turning on the boot log.

press f-8 on restart, choose the bootlog option, see the file :

%windir%/ntbtlog.txt

 

[Brian]

I also had the same problem with the new EZ Antivirus. I even went so
far as to reformat. I then installed windows again, and then EZ
anti-virus. This morning, It would not start up. I uninstalled EZ
Anti-virus, and it starts up like a charm. I would what the problem
is with this thing?

 

[Michael Wright]

It does appear that there was a known problem with version 7 of EZAV on some
machines causing a lock-up during Windows startup. See posting below from
the EZAV forums group:

ftp://ftpez.ca.com/pub/myeTrust/apps/EZAntivirus.exe

EZ AV 7.0.2 has just been released. It fixes the following problems in older
7.0.X releases:

1. Memory leak in cavtray.exe (caused performance problems on some machines)
2. Crash during Windows start-up (some users reported this here)
3. Scheduler not starting in some cases, or starting too late
4. Signature file "patching" failed in some cases, causing a full signature
download when one wasn't necessary. Users may have noticed this in rare
cases.

NOTE: If you have installed the 7.0.2 Beta, please download the official
release as well, since it is slightly different from the Beta and contains
more fixes.

Known Issues:

There are still some known issues which will be fixed in 7.0.3. Main issues
are:

1. Tray icon shows that email scanning is not working, when in fact it is.
This happens on some machines where the email scanner isn't ready (is still
starting up) at the time when the tray icon checks for status. This is not a
risk to the user, but is misleading and will be fixed in upcoming 7.0.3.

2. Google Desktop software conflict/non-compatibility. Will be fixed in
7.0.3

As always, thanks to our users who report bugs and assist with beta testing.

I also tested the RAM on my computer, and it failed, so I removed the module
and cleaned it and the slot good, reinstalled the RAM and haven't had any
problems since! So, I don't know what the problem was. I will install the
new version of EZAV because it does appear that there were several bugs in
the earlier versions. I may go for 7.0.3.

Michael

 

[Michael Wright]

I tried version 7.0.3 and upon the first reboot my computer froze during
startup! I've uninstalled and downgraded to 6.3.0.9. Too many problems
with version 7 for me right now.