Maybe your com port is being hogged. Check for faxes, modems, mice/joysticks. Sometimes more than 1 device might be accidently on the port. What does your device manager say? Also check your bios settings.
Warning: I would run more than just a bad sector test. Run all hd tests. Also do these tests every month if you suspect failure. Tempature does play a role. Sometimes bad sectors can lead to other problems.
This on;lly happens on cold boot when power is off for 2 minutes or more. When I boot it goes into bios post an dloads everything up to HD. During this time I here a lot of strange noise. So I have to power off and reboot sometiomes several times before HDD detectiopn. I have already run the WD HD diags. They found nothing before. I am running them now. What could this be? What coult the noises be if there are no bad sectors or other problems? I very rarely cold boot.
Sometimes I can logon as admin in windows xp at work with the admin account hidden my using c.a.d. Sometimes I can't. Why is this? IS there a way to fix this? Sometimes users like to logon and stay in even when I do updates of some sort. Also is there a way to trigger users documents to save when I am logged in when they are not around without resetting there password. How about dual passwords?