Win 98SE PC's hang at boot...

I have ran across something odd. At work I have a Win 98SE Compaq laptop and at home a Win 98SE Hewlett-Packard laptop. Both are on NOD32 2.50.25.

I still use the one at home from time to time and approx a week or two ago, it began getting to the desktop photo and then just hanging there during boot (before any icons appear.) The only way to get things going again was to force a hard shutdown (which of course is not what I want.) I noticed that the freeze seems to happen just after NOD32 checks the floppy drive for a disk. I have unchecked the system startup file check at login and unchecked the floppy check in AMON, both to no avail. This has happened sporadically around 1 out of every 4 or 5 boots. Now this morning, the seldom used Compaq at work has started acting the same way.

At home, I tried reverting back to 2.12 and it did not seem to help. I'm not sure what to do next. Both machines are clean from malware and viruses. It kinda makes me wonder if one of the recent engine/dat file updates could be causing it because when I ran on 2.12 earlier, I did not have any issues like this at all... on either machine. At home, I finally ended up taking NOD32 off entirely. Once it was off, no boot issues at all. 100% everytime.

It's not critical that I need my 98SE PC on the web anymore but NOD was always sooo excellent on these older machines, I have been kinda shocked that it has started acting this way.

Anyway, looking for some input/thoughts... Thanks!

 

Hi Han,
do you actually mean that if you uninstall NOD32 the problem will disappear?

 

Yes. On the PC at home, once I removed NOD, it has been fine. On the times where I could get it to boot up ok, it ran fine then too. No slow downs or anything. The only issue appears to be during boot up.

 

Do you have Active Desktop enabled, by any chance? Go to Control Panel --> Display --> Web and play around with the "View desktop as web page" checkbox.

 

No, it's just the standard desktop. The background images on both PCs are simple .bmp files...

 

Can you please try repairing Winsock, as discussed in post number 81 here.

Hope this helps...

Cheers

 

Blackspear: From everything I have done both pre and post NOD boot troubles, the dialup connection has worked flawlessly (both of these PCs use dialup.) After removing NOD, I even tested a couple of competing AV products I had never personally looked at before and they had no issues booting or connecting to the net (I still didn't particularly care for them...they aren't NOD! ) So IMO, whatever the problem is, it's not a connection issue. (My home 98SE PC still connects to the web ok without NOD because I tested it.)

 

I have seen slowdowns where Winsock was involved and yet connection was fine, in several instances ZoneAlarm was involved, so I would try a Winsock Repair.

Cheers