PC Locks up on Cold boot

[Muncher]

I have a seriously annoying problem on one of my PCs.

On a cold boot it locks up just as some things are being loaded into the taskbar, such as MSN. Everything stops responding, no HDD activity, mouse and keyboard just frozen. If I hit reset it boots without issue, however every cold boot it locks up at the first attempt.

Does anyone have any ideas?

XP SP2
AVG 7.5
Live Messenger
Azureus
Demon Tools

I'm at a bit of a loss, have never come across this problem before.

[SneakyNeil]

I'd go start/run/msconfig, turn everything off in startup. If that cures it turn things back on one at a time till you find the culprit.

HTH
N

[malman]

More likely hardware than software. Try re-seating the memory as a first attempt

[SneakyNeil]

To elaborate, memory problems 9/10 times cause blue screens/reboots, not lockups. Lockups where the pointer freezes are usually motherboard fault or thermal problem, however in this case with the fault seeming so consistent & reproducible at this point in bootup (the point where startup items are loaded) I'm thinking software first. XP is much better at not locking completely than 9x was but it still happens.

A dodgy USB perpheral is another common & easy thing to eliminate.

[clog]

Have a look in the Event Viewer, it sound to me like it is a page file problem, the page file gets saved every time you turn of your PC and at the startup it loads up again and might cause a problem at a first start.
You can turn the save page file option off and that might solve your problem.
I had a few PC doing that after I installed the updates for windows.

[school boy]

Try uninstalling Azureus.

[T350Chunder]

MS Config can be a little bit limited...

if you download Autoruns from this link... www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/Security/Autoruns.mspx

Start up windows in safe mode, run the Autoruns program and de-select everything that does not have a known or trusted publisher... Also, try and reduce the number of programs that startup automatically.

That should help you get back to a slightly more standard windows startup.

From there, uninstall everything you don't use.

For future use, maybe look at using something like Ghost to capture a clean image of your PC... At least whem your PC is a little tired after a year or so you can go back to a working PC quickly.