Strange booting problem.

[OldBoy]

I've got a strange problem:

I reinstalled XP on my laptop some days ago, and everything was working fine.

My system booted up like there was a hellhound on it's trail.

Today I installed Acronis True Image Workstation, and after a reboot the taskbar (and a lot of services) didn't load anymore.

So I booted in safe mode (taskbar did start) and disabled the services of Acronis True Image that start up with XP.

Rebooted my system, but taskbar wouldn't start.

I then used XP's restore point before the Acronis install, rebooted, taskbar still didn't start.

Then I found out that after I'd boot XP and manually start an application (Photoshop) the taskbar would start (and the rest of the missing services also fire up).

And everything is running normally.

The first service that shows up after starting an application is rundll32.exe.

A pic of the services that do start up, and the services that start up after manually starting an application is attached.

If anyone has a clue what's going on, please enlighten me...

[Marthax]

You are either not comparing the same stages or you have installed a couple of other programs besides Acronis True Image Workstation because your processes doesn't make any sense at all. Unless that backup suite contains Microsoft Windows Defender Antispyware, Avira Internet Security Suite, ZoneLabs Internet Security and a couple of other things you're not doing this right. You're supposed to do one thing at a time, otherwise you won't see the difference. Start fresh and only install your Acronis True Image Workstation and then see where you'll end up.

BEFORE and AFTER what?

[cluberti]

I would strongly suggest that you use autoruns to disable all non-Microsoft items and reboot, and see if the problem persists. If so, I would check to see if it still persists when booting in safe mode.