Not very many things are more annoying than a machine that inexplicably slows down on startup (or shutdown). I’ve used the two tips in this post to troubleshoot these types of issues and figure out what caused the slowness.
1) Enable verbose status messages. This Microsoft KB details how to enable verbose status messages at startup, shutdown, logon, & logoff. This can be useful to determine at what stage the slow down is occurring.
2) Enable user environment debug logging. This Microsoft article shows how to turn on debugging for the user profile and system policy processes. This is done by setting the HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\UserEnvDebugLevel key to a specific value. Setting to 300002, the highest level of verbosity, will generate a huge logfile ( %Systemroot%\Debug\UserMode\Userenv.log ) that will help determine exactly where slowdowns are happening. This is helpful for finding problems with GPO processing, profile loading, problem service startups, etc. See this link for further details on interpreting the results in userenv logs.
Filed under: Troubleshooting, Windows | Tagged: slow boot, slow login, slow shutdown, slow startup, Troubleshooting, userenv, userenv debug, userenv logging, UserEnvDebugLevel, verbose status message, Verbose vs normal status messages, Windows
