When Vista starts I get the login screen. I enter/select the username and type my password just fine. Then a message, "Welcome", is displayed in the center of the screen with the rotating vista progress cursor to the left and the Vista logo at the bottom of the screen. It stays there forever...until I hit Alt-Ctrl-Del. It will move on then. The bigger problem is that when I remote desktop into the machine I get the same thing and there is no Alt-Ctrl-Del workaround. The first time it happened I got an error message in the system tray after getting in, but I ignored it and I don't get it anymore. I think it said something about a service and the fact that the error would cause login problems. That error message is long gone and I don't want to reinstall my entire system to fix this:(

I found the problem. I had an AFS client set to "Obtain AFS tokens when logging into Windows". It must have been failing and holding things up. Oddly enough, I found this because, as I was typing the post, the computer with the problem started the screen saver. When I hit the space key it was still on the Welcome message but I could use Alt-Tab to see an AFS client window was in the background. Alt-Tab didn't work before the screen saver. This is all so odd, but perhaps this post is useful for others. I would assume other client programs that do things at login could make a similar problem.