Sometimes I've noticed a very long pause when booting W7.The pause happensafter "Starting Windows" appears on the screen, and before the "swirling stars" animation, and canlast several tens of seconds.The first couple of times I thought the boot process hadfrozen and manually reset the PC, but now I findthat if you just wait long enough, it comes back to life, the swirling stars appear, and it carries on.This only happens occasionally, and I can't find a way of making it happen to order, which makes this a pretty useless bug report!I have the vague impression it happens after I've changed something in the system (a Windows Update, maybe), but honestly I'm not really sure.I thought I'd mention it in case others have noticed the same thing. Perhaps between us we can pin it down more firmly.Anybody?Thack

Hmm.. Usually when I install something that requires a reboot, I get a pause - but it's after the logo thing flys in, and there's usually a message on the screen telling me that there's something being updated, please wait and for god's sake, whatever you do do NOT turn off the machine... That's just before the log in screen comes up. Might want to keep track of things when you're installing an update or program or other goodie that wants a reboot to see if it happens consistently in that case.

Want to bump this up as I haven't really seen an answer to this after searching. I also get too a long pause between the windows splash screen and the login prompt. There is nither disk activity nor display on the monitor. My Bios is up to date and all the drivers for the MOBO, Video card etc are the latest. This happened when I was booting from a raptor SATA drive and it persists now that I'm booting from a 15K SAS drive. It problem does act like a driver issue. However booting in safe mode didn't make the problem that much better. Is boot logging the same in Win7 as it is in XP? That is my next step, hopefully it will shed some light. anyone have any other suggestions?

As with Vista, Win 7 just has to "do its thing" once in a while. This is occasional.If it happens every time then something is fishy.

Yes, it happens every time. That's the point.