Got an xp boot & shutdown problem. I boot and everything seems to go fine until the welcome screen. Only 1 user and no logon required. Anyhow at the welcome screen it just seems to hang there forever, so I hit Ctrl Alt Del and the sound comes up and it boots normaly. Task manager doesn't come up unless i hit c/a/d again. Everything works just fine. I shut er down when finished and all shutdowns go fine until very end and I can hear hard drive shut down and computer hangs at windows is shutting down screen. I've tried booting in last known good config and that doesn't help. I don't set any restore points. As for these problems being very anoying everything works fine. I have no problems in device manager and very few items checked in startup under msconfig. usually this pc boots up very quickly and you almost don't even see the welcome screen. Since then I have defragmented, scandisked, and removed some non used programs via add/remove software. Still no luck. The only thing I can think of that I was doing before was testing out an old usb mass storage/ ide controller device. I put a cd rom into the case/ plugged in usb port and couldn't find compatible drivers. I tried downloading many drivers that were susposed to be for this device and had no luck. So I removed device and removed all traces of it in device manager. The computer has since then been starting and shutting down funny. Any ideas on how to fix this problem? I thought I was doing good by it running with no major problems or reinstalls for over a year.

Chad, "I don't set any restore points...." You mean you have RESTORE turned off?? Whenever you attempt to install any new/used devices, you should always creat a RESTORE POINT so that if things go wrong (as they have) you can at least get back to the point where things were working fine. Having Restore turned on does not upset the PC in any way, and it is a backup for when things go wrong. As for your problem, there could be remnants of drivers in the system which are attempting to load on startup, and cannot do so, hence it "hangs". Without a restore point to fall back on, it may be difficult to trace the offending program/driver. Could you tell me exactly what this USB/IDE controller device was? Safe Computing...:o)

It was an external sony cd rw drive via usb. Non working one. I seem to have a page file error that is uncorrectable. No matter how I set it when I reboot it goes to 0. I think i'm gonna scan through the drivers in device manager and update them all.

Chad, Sounds like a pain. I have had driver conflicts before and couldn't get rid of them. I finally decided to wipe my hard disk clean. Windows xp should find most devices and load the proper drivers. Reformatting may be you best bet. Just make sure you have everything backed up and that you have your Windows Install disk and all program disks you need. Good Luck.

After investigating I did have restore turned on on my local drive. I forgot I just turned it off on my backup drive. Did a restore and all is back to normal or at least like it used to be.