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I downloaded WhatInStartup but haven’t activated it. I’m going to treat it like Regcure; have it on the ready but not running until I’m sure this is a good program. I never heard of it; my PC pops up the usual warnings of possible viruses and such; I want other opinions before running the file. It looks promising but I’m cautious. Greythings8

OK, let’s try finding out what’s running at startup to see what can or should be eliminated.

I happen to like a utility that was mentioned fairly recently here in The Lounge because of its simplicity: WhatInStartup – Disable/enable/delete programs running at Windows startup

At the same time, if you’re more detail oriented, the the ever popular Autoruns for Windows. It IS a complex program, so I’d recommend starting with the first one above to see. If you like, you could make a cropped screenshot like the following to let “expert” Loungers make suggestions, if possible. (the attached is only a partial screenshot.)

I just went to Google and clicked the set this site as your homepage button. Then closed and opened IE. Worked just fine, much better than Comcast. I’m starting to believe Comcast is responsible for everything bad that’s happened to my computer this past week. Greythings8

Out here in the Greater Seattle area, there is NO Comcast login, except for the email and for the master Comcast account. This master account is for the user to add/delete email accounts with Comcast. One can also order other services through this account. But this login is mainly for the email.

Comcast is “ALWAYS” on unless one pulls the power cable from the cable modem.

Using the Comcast Icon, sets the home page to be Comcast.net and yes it can take several seconds to load. Not as bad as CNN, MSN or any other loaded up news page. Yes, with all of the protection programs, IE takes about 10 seconds to open, using the IE icon. We now have 6 machines connected to our router which is connected to the Comcast modem, and they ALL load very quick using IE 8.

I would go to a clean site (I use Google.com) and it loads very quick, and set it to be your “Home page”. To do this, with IE open, go to Google.com or what ever site you want to be your home page, go to the menu, Tools, Internet Options. There you will see a “Use Current” button, this will select current site as the home page. Now OK, yourself out, close IE, and now restart IE and it should open to the web site that you chose.

Right. OK. So it’s not bluescreen but initial background color. Thanks for the clarification. So, working from the assumption that it’s the Comcast software, what do we do about it? Because it’s not just a case of two or three minutes. We’re talking 5+ minutes of icons with blue background and nothing happening. I don’t think it’s supposed to last that long (note the trouble I had with the screensaver) and neither does my patience. I think perhaps (from what I read of your response) that it’s a case of too much food going down a narrow throat. So obviously I need to get rid of some stuff here, but I don’t know what (maybe next time I shouldn’t use Armenian vodka makers from Moscow to install the software). Greythings8

I think you can see from my edited quote here that I’m beginning to think that there’s nothing wrong with your machine per se, other than some poorly constructed Comcast software and a bit of impatience on your part, with no offense intended.

I have been through the cycles of phone line, DSL and now cable internet and not only for myself but many, many other folks I’ve worked with. It’s my experience that many (if not all) ISPs do a little too much with their installation and setup CDs. They mess with your browser, network connection settings and all manner of other things that are not necessary to get connected, especially in an “always on” setup like DSL or cable. It’s my practice NEVER to use the ISP provided CD and I do it myself, the manual way. With today’s OS and hardware that usually requires very little setup and tweaking. In your case, the Comcast stuff is already installed, so I think you’re doing the right thing. Boot your computer and go directly to IE or whatever browser you choose and you should be connected. I’m not familiar with Comcast but I would hope they don’t require you to “logon” through them every time you want to use the web. If you think that’s true, let us know.

Secondly, from the gist of your wording, I think maybe the thing you’re calling “bluescreen” is really the Windows initial background color which DOES go away as Windows finishes loading all its drivers and other software and then loads YOUR chosen background and/or wallpaper. I think that for now you need to be a little patient and let the bootup finish to see if it always ends with your background and desktop. Sometimes that can take SEVERAL minutes. See next paragraph.

If I’m right about the ISP story, what may be taking your machine so long to boot could very well be the loading and setting up of the stuff that Comcast did when you installed it. If my suggestions appear to be true or somewhat so, we can explore further what you might do to clear up some of the auto-load stuff. Let’s see how it goes.

Typically, when I go online, I click on one of the Comcast icons on the Desktop. Usually it was the Comcast Account Login icon. There are several other Comcast icons that were installed when the computer was hooked up. Frankly I didn’t know which ones to click; I picked one and used it the most. I didn’t think to click the IE icon. When I did it took about 30 seconds to connect. The start page is Comcast; a news and info site like CNN or Yahoo. My PC has Symantec AntiVirus with LiveUpdate. As for the stop errors, I have a theory that they might be something else. When I turned on my PC, I took notes. Maybe my description might help but I don’t know. (1) The Desktop (grassy field) appears and then vanishes; (2) The icons appear with the bluescreen background, the arrow either appears with the hourglass or switches between hourglass/arrow; (3) Unable to click icon with icon/bluescreen background (a couple of days ago, when the icon/bluescreen switched to screensaver, I moved the mouse to bring back the screen, but the screensaver froze); (4) I wait until the red indicator light on my PC stops blinking; (5) I turn the computer off then back on; (6) The same thing happens but the icon/bluescreen lasts temporarily (several seconds) before the desktop reappears; (7) I can click online with the icon/desktop background. There are no error messages during this period. Now, I don’t know if it qualifies as a stop error. Another point of interest: when I clicked on the IE icon, as opposed to the Comcast icon, no error message appeared. I don’t know if this means anything; it might happen tomorrow when I do the same thing. As it stood, it took me a half hour to get online to type this message. Greythings8

Hello,
The System properties seem fine, in general; the amount of RAM is enough. If it indeed is an AMD Athlon XP 1900+ and it’s running at 1.21 GHz that is a bit slow.
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P.S. BTW, if you like, you can remove some of the quoted text when you reply to someone. The Lounge software will, by default, quote the entire message you reply to. But in many threads that isn’t necessary, since all posts are there already, it only makes the post longer. To do that you can remove some of the text between [ quote ] and [ /quote ]; as long as both codes are there it should work.

These are the errors I found. The DCOM errors go back several days so I didn’t include them all. Maybe you can make sense of this. Thanx. Greythings8

Event Type: Error
Event Source: Dhcp
Event Category: None
Event ID: 1002
Date: 5/18/2009
Time: 10:12:12 PM
User: N/A
Computer: TONY1
Description:
The IP address lease 24.19.234.214 for the Network Card with network address 0013F76F3F7F has been denied by the DHCP server 0.0.0.0 (The DHCP Server sent a DHCPNACK message).

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.
Event Type: Error
Event Source: DCOM
Event Category: None
Event ID: 10010
Date: 5/19/2009
Time: 9:53:03 PM
User: TONY1Tony
Computer: TONY1
Description:
The server {0002DF01-0000-0000-C000-000000000046} did not register with DCOM within the required timeout.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

Event Type: Error
Event Source: DCOM
Event Category: None
Event ID: 10010
Date: 5/19/2009
Time: 10:12:14 AM
User: TONY1Tony
Computer: TONY1
Description:
The server {0002DF01-0000-0000-C000-000000000046} did not register with DCOM within the required timeout.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

Event Type: Error
Event Source: DCOM
Event Category: None
Event ID: 10010
Date: 5/18/2009
Time: 10:25:05 PM
User: TONY1Tony
Computer: TONY1
Description:
The server {0002DF01-0000-0000-C000-000000000046} did not register with DCOM within the required timeout.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

Event Type: Error
Event Source: W32Time
Event Category: None
Event ID: 29
Date: 5/18/2009
Time: 10:12:17 PM
User: N/A
Computer: TONY1
Description:
The time provider NtpClient is configured to acquire time from one or more time sources, however none of the sources are currently accessible. No attempt to contact a source will be made for 14 minutes. NtpClient has no source of accurate time.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

Event Type: Error
Event Source: W32Time
Event Category: None
Event ID: 17
Date: 5/18/2009
Time: 10:12:17 PM
User: N/A
Computer: TONY1
Description:
Time Provider NtpClient: An error occurred during DNS lookup of the manually configured peer ‘time.windows.com,0x1’. NtpClient will try the DNS lookup again in 15 minutes. The error was: A socket operation was attempted to an unreachable host. (0x80072751)

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

Event Type: Error
Event Source: Dhcp
Event Category: None
Event ID: 1002
Date: 5/18/2009
Time: 10:12:12 PM
User: N/A
Computer: TONY1
Description:
The IP address lease 24.19.234.214 for the Network Card with network address 0013F76F3F7F has been denied by the DHCP server 0.0.0.0 (The DHCP Server sent a DHCPNACK message).

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

I have moved this thread to the Windows XP forum (from the Internet Explorer forum).

You should be able to find out what kind of STOP error this is by looking in Event Viewer. To do this

[*]Select Run… from the Start menu
[*]Type eventvwr.msc into the Run dialog box and click the OK button
[*]In the pane on the left of the Event Viewer application, select System
[*]Look for errors that happened around the time of your incident and double click them to get the details

If you find an error (with a RED flag) at the time of your incident then post the details here and we may be able to help understand what happened.

I right clicked on My Computer; description is as follows: Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition; Version 2002; Service Pack 3: Computer: AMD ATHLON [TM] XP 1900+: 1.21 GHz, 512MB of RAM. The error message reads: “INTERNET EXPLORER SCRIPT ERROR: LINE:2 CHAR:1 An error has occurred in the script on this page: DTx Framework is undefined: 0 : Chrome: //ComcastB/content/toolbar.HTM: Do you want to continue running scripts on this page? yes/no.” This is the only error message. Hope this helps. Thanx. Greythings8

First, there is nothing wrong with using an older PC. At the same time I can answer your second question under (2): “Is high speed too rich for it?” No, I don’t think so, and I don’t think that that is the problem here. True, with 2, 8 or perhaps 15 Mbit/s you have the possibility to download at high speed and that can strain the memory a bit, if on low resources.

As for the hardware itself; I asked so that we could get a general picture, since you have blue screens (or Stop Errors) and perhaps other problems. The manual can but usually doesn’t tell what kind of processor and memory are installed, since the motherboard can be configured in many different ways.

The Asus A7V266-E is a “socket A” motherboard. It uses processors from AMD, such as AMD Athlon XP or AMD Sempron. Socket A (or socket 462) was a socket type that came around 2000-2001 and was in use for some years, so I would agree that 7 years is likely, I had one in 2002 and some years on. That is not a problem at all, since it is contemporary with Windows XP.

The motherboard can hold up to 3 GB DDR memory, and as you say; the three memory sockets can hold 64, 128, 256, 512 or 1024 MB each. At the time they usually shipped them with a single 256 MB memory module.

When you have started Windows (and logged in, if you use a password) so that you are watching the Desktop (“the grass field”) you can get some basic information about the processor and the amount of memory by looking at the Properties for My Computer. A quick access to the properties is to: press the Windows-key (if present) and then press the Pause/Break key (found top right on the keyboard).

Or you can simply right-click on “My Computer” (either on the Desktop or in the Start menu) and select Properties. It will then show you the processor type, its speed and the amount of memory. It can be useful to know.

As for the blue screens, or as I said stop errors, they are there to tell that something important and critical has happened. You said: “Sometimes the grass field reappears and I can log on. Other times the bluescreen stays and I’m stuck.” The default setting in Windows is to restart the PC when a system error occurs, that is to help the user get going if the error was just a small glitch (but one should not keep it in that condition, blue screens every start). That could explain why you sometimes see the Desktop again, but then you would have seen the PC restart. That is also what I think about the behaviour before Comcast; you said the blue screens “lasted for only 30 seconds or so”. When the error is there, that means that Windows has stopped. If the blue screen goes away, Windows must have restarted the PC.

Blue screens are mostly related to faulty drivers or hardware. To solve that one needs to know which error it is. They sure are not easy to decipher.

If you can type down the error message and post it here, you probably can get some help with it. They usually look something like this: Stop 0x0000000A and sometimes mention a specific file name. The file name, if present, can also be a great clue.

Since your OS is Windows XP and you have problems with start up and OS, apart from the IE script error, perhaps this thread should be moved to the Windows XP forum.

My PC uses Windows XP Home Edition with Service Pack 2. It’s a used computer I got from a friend. I don’t know its age. Maybe less than a decade but more than five years. Let’s say around seven or eight to be safe. The monitor is a Dell but the processor is an ASUS A7V266-E (or so the manual says). According to the manual: “The three DDR DIMM sockets support 2.5 volt unbuffered/registered Double Data Rate Synchronous Dynamic Access Memory of 64MB, 128MB, 256MB, 512MB, and 1GB to form a memory size between 64MB to 3GB.” I don’t know what I just typed but I’m assuming this is what you mean by RAM. When I had Netzero the blue screen lasted for only 30 seconds or so. The problem started a day or so after I went Comcast. The grassy fields picture appears, then the bluescreen, then the icons. Sometimes the grass field reappears and I can log on. Other times the bluescreen stays and I’m stuck. When that happens I have to turn off the computer and turn it on again, hoping that it boots up as normal; sometimes it works but I don’t think it’s very healthy. As near as I can tell the version I had before IE8 was IE7. Hope this helps. Thanks. Greythings8

I would wait with adding more software to the mix (or trying different kind of registry edits).

Can you tell us something about the computer? This is posted in the Internet Explorer forum, and then we don’t know what Windows version you use.

[*]So what Windows version & service pack is installed on the PC?
[*]Since you mention age; what kind of processor and how much RAM (memory)?
[*]Did the blue screens start directly after you went to high speed, Comcast?
[*]What version of Internet Explorer did you use before IE8?

There is nothing wrong with upgrading to IE8, if one wants the latest browser from MSFT. But then the computer must be stable and working, installing new software doesn’t solve problems.

It is possible to, for example, disable script debugging in IE in some cases, but we need to know a little more about the PC in general.

I would definitely wait with installing/using Regcure.