Hi...This is an intermittent problem but it occurs often enough to be annoying. During boot, when the process reaches the "WELCOME" window, a line of text also appears stating "Windows is starting up"...and then it freezes there. The only way I've been able get beyond that is to shut down the computer and reboot...sometimes once, sometimes as many as 3 times until it will finally boot completely. Does anyone know what is causing this and how to prevent it from happening? My setup is:

System: Windows XP Pro Service Pack 3
Computer: AMD Athlon (tm) 64 x2 Dual, Core Processor 6000+ 3.00 GHz 1.75 GB of Ram

Thanks

   I have had the same problem in the past.  I don't remember it happening lately.  Usually it works the second time that I start it.  I don't know what caused it.

Ray...After poking around Google/forums, apparently a lot of others are having this problem too. Strange that no one has come up with an answer. Could it be that one file is trying to load before the Welcome screen has a chance to completely load?

Windows is in control at that point.  It is some kind of bug in Windows.  Files cannot load until Windows sets up the environment for them to load in and then goes and runs them.

Thanks Ray...I'll try to reach someone at Microsoft to see what they say.

I had a similar problem with my WinXP SP3 system.  What I did was to remove two programs from loading at start up and now I load them manually.  I haven't had a freezeup since doing that.

The two I load manually are MS Security Essentials and Malwarebytes.  
Laverne

What you need is a program called NTFS.chk
You can get this from a boot disk called Hirem (I use 9. or download it and use a boot image to make a boot disk.

Running the check sorts of what Windows Checkdsk should do but doesn't in that it runs through all your file attributes, searches for orphans and sorts the file tables.

Laverne...Tried your suggestions but still have the problem. Thanks for trying.
Crashman...Will try the NTFS.chk possibility. Thanks!