Desktop does not appear after login

[SDavid]

I am running XP Pro which was updated to Service Pack 2 about one month ago. Everything has been working fine since that time. Just before Christmas, I shut down the CPU while I was out of town over the holidays and when I booted up upon my return, the login came up okay, but when I entered my password there was a delay as it loaded my settings and then the screen went to a blank blue rather than the desktop.

I can get everything to work by doing Control-Alt-Delete to bring up the Taskmanager where I choose to Restart the system. On the second boot, when I enter the password, everything works fine and the Desktop appears. The system works fine from there.

The weird thing is that the system won't boot until I restart through the Taskmanager and log in a second time. This happens EVERYTIME!

I tried resetting the password, disabling Quick Switching, etc. but no luck. Any ideas short of smoking the drive and starting over?

[Play_The_0dds]

I dont belive you have a virus, if you do I dont think it is the cause. SP2 and several other updates leading to it cause what you are having. sp2 and drivers you have may not be compatible...as with directX 9. I have been backing up the files off drives on a different machine then just reinstall, update everything correctly to fix the problem you are having because it saves time. I now know it is MS updates causing this.

[SDavid]

Thanks for the info. I was hoping for a simple fix to avoid the complete "smoke the hard drive" solution.

I have not heard of anyone else having a similar problem after upgrading to SP2. Some day I will learn to not install these Microsoft updates when my computer is working fine. I thought SP2 would help keep away the Popup ads, but I receive more than ever now. What progress...

[Play_The_0dds]

I have been doing some detective work lately as time permits.
Check the mfg's site of your computer, they may have updated drivers and software patches that will solve most of the problems the MS updates are causing.

[SDavid]

Thanks. That's a good suggestion. I am just still puzzled why everything worked fine for a month or so, and then after being turned off for a week at Christmas, the damn thing won't boot correctly. I have no other problems with this computer once I am logged in (after the second try).