The problem used to occur {not, sometimes, often, every time}. I found avast to be the likely problem in much a similar way babyblues409 did, and this led me to this board and that particular post.
To the best of my knowledge, I have not installed software or done anything else that changed the system. This said, Microsoft’s automatic updates will have happened and, as with the other problem report, the problem gradually started to appear so who knows which update caused a possible incompatibility.
Symptoms:
-1- the mouse cursor does work, until the computer freezes for other reasons.
-2- selecting a login does not work.
-3- the keyboard does work once. Example: I can turn on caps lock but I cannot turn it off.
-4- network traffic (as witnessed from another computer running tcpdump) stops very early in the boot process. Only a dhcp request and an arp request are performed. Normally several netbios packets (and other stuff) are sent after this. The system does not respond to ping either.
I have tried to fix the problem by upgrading avast; at first this seemed to work but, as it turns out, it could boot only once before the problem returned.
Now, I could try and remove avast, clean up my system and try reinstalling avast again. But I would like to wait a short while with this and give more knowledgable people a chance to guide me through bug hunting.
Well the recent versions of avast are starting sooner to get earlier protection, on some systems that can mean a service that is required hasn’t loaded yet.
So delaying the loading avast services after other system services ‘should’ get round that problem, now that seemed to be the case for you and I’m as surprised as you that when restoring the quick start the original problem didn’t reappear, computers. There really doesn’t seem to be any order to the windows boot.
So all I can suggest is monitor the situation and if it reappears delay the loading of avast services again and if that resolves that then leave it set like that. The security impact of that is minimal. If you check the scanned count: in the Standard Shied after boot with the ‘quick start’ enabled and again after the delay avast services is set you will see a small decrease in the number of files scanned. For me that difference is 25-30 files less, with 125 files scanned with avast services delayed.