Windows 7 taskbar freezes on startup for about 1-2 mins

Question

Running Windows 7 64-bit for about 4 months now. Never had this problem, didn't install anything new recently.

When I boot up I can't do anything in the taskbar, it's frozen for about 1-2 minutes then everything is normal. I can right click on my desktop and move my mouse around. This randomly just started happening a couple days ago after a reboot. I have a 3.2ghz quad, SSD, 4 GB RAM, etc. and it usually starts up quickly.

After some troubleshooting (including running antivirus and Anti-Malware), it doesn't appear to be software related, but appears to be services related. I can boot up in safe mode and safe mode with networking just fine. I can also boot up normally with all my regular software loading at startup, BUT with all my services turned off.

Now the odd part. When I run msconfig to disable all the services at startup and go through ticking them on 5-10 at a time or so and booting up it seems to be somewhat random. Ticking everything on from "Application Experience" halfway down to about "Quality Windows Audio Video Experience" and I can boot without the 1-2 min. freeze. Then I start ticking the stuff below that from a couple of Remote Accesses to Smart Card and Task Scheduler, etc. But the weird part is sometimes it will freeze sometimes it won't. I can't narrow it down. Then if it freezes, I'll boot up in safe mode and turn the ones I just turned on back off and I'll reboot normally but it will freeze again. Which makes no sense because that configuration just worked without freezing just before. I got frustrated enough that I backed up and wiped my hard drive (formatted and everything) and reinstalled Windows 7 but when I booted up, the freeze happened again.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Sysinternals Process Monitor has a very detailed boot logger option, it'll give you more info than you want about what's going on when you boot.