SOLVED Boot process ever sloooooooooower

[General Domel]

Must have been some /&§$/(&"(/ update again: Since this morning, the Win10 boot process if the slooooooooooowest I have ever seen since the bad old times of the IBM 486. I checked the time: 6.10 minutes staring at the welcome screen and the stupidly rotating cursor, hard disk silent, mouse deactivated, no response to the keyboard, no way to disrupt whatever this thing is doing or not doing. Any idea for a workaround to avoid whatever MS is destroying its reputation again with?

God, how much I hate Win10.

 

[Tim Locke]

It would help if you showed us:
The spec of your machine.
What non-MS software you are running...like Antivirus and such.
Ideally a list of the startup applications from Task manager.

Good chance then that someone can help.

 

[General Domel]

Well, the machine is rather old, yet the boot process has worked normally until a few days ago. As for the non-MS software, I have eliminated the external Antivirus software last week and rely on Defender since. The only active startup applications right now are the HD Audio Control Panel, CCleaner and Classic Start Menu (the Win10 start menu irrecoverably broke down a few days after installation, some months ago). Even OneDrive and an obscure function named "tsnp2std Microsoft" are deactivated. Yet every boot takes minutes during which nio input is possible.

Somehow I am suspicious that Defender is the culprit.

BTW, I notice that the Registry is full of paths and entries belonging to a user I have deleted weeks ago. Maybe this contributes to the problem. How can I change all these aberrant entries without going into each of them individually? CCleaner fails to provide such an option.

 

[Grizzly]

Sometimes this is caused by the maintenance of windows 10 that tries to repair bad cluster/ invalid entries on your hard drive. Let it run its course and then restart again. You may be surprised...

 

[General Domel]

The maintenance should run low level and not block the entire system at every boot attempt, shouldn't it? If it sees a reason to do that, then something is terribly wrong with Win10's shutdown routine.

God, how much I hate Win10.

 

[General Domel]

One morning, the routine was just back to normal. Well ...