I think I broke something.

[HyperHacker]

I just reinstalled WinXP SP2, it was working fine, but I used Sysinternals AutoRuns to disable a few things. Now it exhibits rather odd behaviour at startup: It starts fast, but after about 30 seconds it freezes (the mouse still moves), and then after about 2 minutes it plays the startup sound and starts to work like normal. Here's a list of things I disabled (I also removed the entries for some nonexistant files; they were deleted before this, just stuff like Media Player and Messenger):

[edit] Refuses to show up properly; see attatched file instead. [/edit]

[edit 2] Hmm, this seems to be a bit more complex than I initially thought. I put the following in a batch file in the Startup folder in my Start menu:

start sndvol32
sleep 5000
nircmd win -style title "Volume Control" 0xC00000
nircmd win setsize title "Volume Control" 1543 976 56 190
nircmd win trans class "Shell_TrayWnd" 178
sleep 2000
start notepad "F:\Ideas and crap\Stuff to do.html"

What this should do is start the Volume Control app, wait 5 seconds, remove its title bar, and make it small and placed under my taskbar (so I can see the volume ), turn the taskbar 30% translucent, then wait 2 seconds and launch Stuff to do.html in Notepad. What happens instead:

1) Windows starts.

2) The taskbar turns translucent.

3) Stuff to do.html is launched in Notepad.

4) I open the Display Properties control panel by right-clicking on the desktop and poke around a bit.

5) I open My Computer and double-click a hard drive icon. Explorer freezes for about 2 minutes.

6) The startup sound plays, Volume Control is launched, and Explorer resumes. (The Volume Control window never gets moved, resized or has its titlebar removed, as the program that does so has already run.)

Seems like Volume Control launches, but doesn't actually initialize and show a window until the startup sound has finished playing, the startup sound doesn't play until some other event occurrs, and Explorer waits for this event for a while, then decides it's not going to happen and just pretends it did. If I reboot, then just leave it alone for an hour (during dinner) it eventually does whatever it's doing; the volume control is open and there's no delays when opening a drive.

I checked that none of the extensions I removed from autorun were still enabled; there were only the 3 WMP ones, which I disabled to no avail. Pressing Ctrl+Alt+Delete has the same effect. Opening a drive/folder via Run doesn't do it, but it will freeze temporarily once I double-click any folder within that (not when I open a file though). I tried having Process Explorer run at startup (by putting it in that batch file) and not only did it not show anything unusual, but the sound played as normal and it never froze. [/edit]

Also, I don't think this is related since it happened before I reinstalled, but I got an NEC ND-4551A DVD burner, and it works but when I put in a DVD-RW, Windows thinks it's a zero-byte CD-R. The only program that can actually recognize and write to the disc is Nero 6 which came with the burner. It works fine with CD-Rs, and those are the only media I've had a chance to try; it also reads and plays DVD video and pressed CDs without a problem. Can this be fixed? (I used 4x Nexxtech DVD-RWs, if it means anything.) The name shows "DVD-RAM Drive" when no disc is inserted, but the type shows "CD Drive".

autorun.txt

Edited April 23, 2006 by HyperHacker

[HyperHacker]

Alright, well after much trial, error, and the power going out, I figured out the startup problem. I have to have both Microsoft Acoustic Echo Canceller (aec) and Microsoft Kernel DRM Audio Descrambler Filter (drmkaud) enabled to prevent this. This explains the freeze when trying to open drives/folders; it plays a sound when I do this, probably any thread trying to play a sound gets hung up for a while. (Not sure why it'd do it when hitting Ctrl+Alt+Delete though. Maybe it's handled by the same thread as the startup sound.) Thing is I don't want any of that DRM crap (I don't even use WMP) and I don't even know what that other one does but it certainly sounds (no pun intended) unnecessary. So can I disable these without messing things up?