Black screen with cursor for 5 minutes before desktop appears

[jmm72]

Customer purchased 2 identical machines on 9/2/17.  Asked me to install Office 365, Eset AV, apply pending HP and M$ updates.  Removed McAfee LiveSafe trialware, installed Eset, O365, allowed HP to update BIOS and install newer versions of support tools.  Now one PC (these has SSDs for a disk) boots very nicely while the other comes to the login screen, accepts the password, does 10 seconds of the spinning balls, and then goes black with an active cursor.  ctl-alt-del will bring up the expected choices.  Task manager shows nothing running, no pegged CPU, zip.  Wait 5 minutes and the normal wallpaper and GUI appear.

Multiple runs of the HP Assitant show no new downloads required, both machines are on the same BIOS version (August 2017), no real differences in contents of Windows Event log.  Checking for Windows updates shows nothing new.

Any magic out there?

I've never seen a better A-B comparision of the apparent random nature of Windows 10 Home that this pair of machines.  Last month I had two Windows 10 machines, one laptop, one desktop, simply collapse software wise.  In both cases they ran Ubuntu from a Live CD perfectly and passed all the UEFI diagnostics but none of the repair options could bring Windows 10 back from the dead.  Finally wiped the disks and did a fresh install from a system DVD.

I've still got Windows 2000 machines, XP, Vista, and 7 that run better than 8, 8.1 or 10.  Doesn't seem to matter if the machine started with 7, 8, 8.1, or 10 - once they get to 10 it is all down hill.  Why?

[paganini]

I have the same problem

laptop HP envy x360 15-bq051sa , purchased 2 days ago

a couple of hours after initial setup , it develops problem with black screen after login, which last for 5 minutes

I did factory reset and the problem comes back after a couple of hours

I only remove McAfee , install chrome and Office 2016

[jmm72]

Did you notice an updates from HP being applied just before the problem reappears?

Likewise, although Microsoft makes it "invisible", how about a Windows update?

Something must be changing to explain the behavior, unless there is something like the good old memory leak or buffer overflow that results in trashing the registry after some semi-random delay.  Must be one of the great new features in Windows 10!

[paganini]

after third time factory reset, I enabled system restore , and was creating restore point after each install/uninstall
and this time the problem did not appear anymore

I noticed some constantly failing HP update (in windows update, sorry dont have details as I gave it back to the client)

[jmm72]

I timed the delays and they are 30 seconds of spinning balls after the password is accepted, then 6 minutes and 30 seconds of a black screen with live cursor (can open task manager - nothing seems odd, no pinned CPU or disk), and finally after a total of 7 minutes the wallpaper, icons, and task bar appear.  At that point the machine appears to run normally but I'm just the IT guy, not the owner (his wife took it home to him this afternoon).

For a brand new HP laptop with an SSD and an i5 processor, this is clearly wrong.  Doubly so since this is one of a pair of new "identical" machines purchased less than 2 weeks ago - the other one is fine.  I've done all the A-B comparisons of the task manager screens, default applications, installed software, startups yet nothing.

I was able to recover to the last restore point, a Windows critical update, and everything was fine for an hour or two, then right back in the dump.

[paganini]

did you check Event Viewer ?
I remeber it had several errors , waiting for something to get activated and not having permissions

but you are right anyway, this should not be happening to a new piece of equipment , mine costed more than 800 pounds
and it took me a day to sort it out
(well, still not sure what fixed it, and hope they are not going to call me tomorrow)

[jmm72]

When I had both machines on the bench at home I did review the Event logs of each machine and found no smoking gun.  The actual number and types of messages (errors, warnings, information) were virtually identical.

[Spacemanlou · Accepted solution]

Chatted with HP support about the same issue. Turned out to be a windows issue. Use search to open msconfig and go to the services tab and disable App Readiness

[Shiliu]

This solution worked for me. It seems so many people have been having this issue in the past few days for the HP Envy x360. My laptop updated yesterday, so maybe that was an issue?

[Spacemanlou]

I actually had the issue with Spectre x360 15-bl0012dx. I suspect it is an issue with a recent Windows update and that possibly HP software magnifies the problem.