Win10: Infinite Spinning Dots upon bootup when "Start with Windows" enabled

[Aeosura]

Title self-implictive. I have Windows 10 installed on a Corsair MP500 m.2 drive with an overclocked i7 7700K @4.6GHz on a MSI 270i mini-itx motherboard, so I am able to load into my desktop in a matter of seconds upon cold-booting my PC. Normally I am greeted with MSI's g-series logo followed by a set of spinning dots on a black screen background, except the dots spin infinitely and MSI's splash screen remains static and never transitions.

My rgb mouse and keyboard light up during the beginning of the spinning dot loading process, but brick and become unresponsive after 3 seconds. I assume all the usb ports die at this point. This has happened several times after enabling "Start with Windows," with and without "high-priority" also enabled.

The first solution I have used to get into Windows was to force Windows to go into "Repair and Troubleshooting" mode by forcefully rebooting the PC during the beginning of the boot process, before the keyboard/mouse lights shut off, and then proceed to use "Startup Repair" under Troubleshoot>Advanced Options. This, in turn, uninstalls Wallpaper Engine by using a system restore point that preceeds the app's installation, since Windows cannot find any other solution and doesn't understand how to turn off Wallpaper Engine's auto-start without human input.

I would like to still enable auto-start, possibly with an app-delay solution. Any suggestions? Anyone else encounter this issue and have an idea of what's going wrong during the boot process?

[Biohazard]

Do you have Afterburner installed? If yes, apply the changes here http://steamcommunity.com/app/431960/discussions/2/135508031951210104/ or try disabling its auto start temporarily just to make sure.

In case you have the latest Nvidia driver, this could also be related to a video bug they introduced, which should be fixed when using the previous driver again: http://steamcommunity.com/app/431960/discussions/2/1696040635908929925/ this bug also makes the PC stutter each time the video is changed.

[Aeosura]

No, the apps I use on auto-startup with Windows other than Wallpaper Engine is NZXT's CAM software, Discord, Bitdefender, Rainmeter, Logitech Gaming Software, and Steam.

[Biohazard]

Can you check which graphics driver version is installed? That buggy driver was released on the 26th of February, so if you had this issue before then it must be unrelated too.

Can you check the Event Viewer in Windows? Does it perhaps show anything related?

[Aeosura]

I bought Wallpaper Engine exactly on Feb 26, and didn't enable auto-start until the 27th. I have a feeling I updated the graphics driver at the same time I enabled auto-start on WE before shutting down the PC but I can't remember for sure.

I think the Event Viewer would have shown something had I known to use it before I re-installed Windows 10.

After disabling auto-start on WE and uninstalling the app I found out that my boot time had increased significantly, from less than 10 seconds to nearly 2 minutes, my PC had shown the same symptoms as if WE's auto-start was still on, except the keyboard and mouse would light back up after a minute, and the bios splash screen would transition to a black screen, spinning dots still present, for about another minute before finally booting into Windows. This was something that didn't change even if I disabled all the other start-up apps, enabled/disabled Fast Boot in bios, changed bios boot to exclude Legacy bios booting, and even after updating bios firmware to a newer version. Needless to say, 2 minutes on a m.2 NVMe drive drove me insane and decided the pros and cons of a clean install outweighed sticking around trying to fix the booting problem even after WE was left uninstalled.

I have not re-installed WE yet but my boot times are back to being less than 10 seconds again with the same apps and settings prior to WE's first installation.

Edit: not all usb ports "die" as mentioned in my first post since I remember my usb wifi-adapter was on the entire time Windows was "loading" when WE's auto-start was enabled.

Note: keep in mind my PC is new, only 3 months old with the exception of the gtx 770 carried over from my previous build, all drivers are up to date and no bloat-ware is installed, everything ran smoothly up until WE.

[Biohazard]

Originally posted by Aeosura:

After disabling auto-start on WE and uninstalling the app I found out that my boot time had increased significantly

So you mean even after you uninstalled it, the boot times were still bad? The program makes no permanent changes to the system, so if the files from the installation folder are gone, nothing is left from this - well, except the theme color which is but a value, Windows persists it when the program sets it to something. I don't think the theme color would affect the boot time though.

The driver 391.01 definitely screws up the video acceleration of Nvidia. I installed it on my system to verify it before contacting them and it made my logon screen freeze for a while, not minutes but perhaps 30 seconds, when WE was auto starting a video. Do you remember which wallpaper you had selected, was it a video at all?

But since you said even after uninstalling it you had issues, it couldn't be caused by opening a video through Nvidia's system, unless of course the uninstall from Steam didn't really work. Did you by chance verify that it was all deleted?

[Aeosura]

Maybe the registry editor didn't completely remove its settings? I guess I should have saved a copy of the registry.

I didn't verify if everything was deleted though, a few of the wallpapers I subscribe to are videos (the largest being 500MB, the rest were 250 and under). I had it set to play from a Favorites playlist I created comprised of about 31 wallpapers for my 1440p monitor, most were scenes <40MB in size.

Also, a correction, the 2-minute boot time started happening after disabling auto-start. With auto-start enabled Windows would hang infinitely, with 15 minutes being the longest I've ever waited before forcing the PC into repair/troubleshoot mode. The uninstallation of WE was part of the attempt at fixing the 2-min boot times alongside the bios changes and other start-up app changes before the Windows 10 reinstall.

It's hard to remember every little detail. After saving a copy of the registry for backup and creating a restore point I plan to reinstall Wallpaper Engine, but leave auto-start disabled for now until the next nvidia update or until I get a GTX 2080 when it launches. Are there any specific tools you recommened to use next time I enable auto-start to see if the same thing happens and how to better record the boot data for errors and bugs?

[Biohazard]

I think exporting any relevant event viewer logs may help and the log file from WE itself:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\wallpaper_engine\log.txt

Other than that, you could check for the driver issue to still be present by switching between video wallpapers before ever using auto start. If the mouse/desktop freeze for a second when switching, then you are affected by that video bug which also freezes/stalls the login screen.

None of WE's processes are started before the login screen and could have any effect on your boot though. If you enabled 'high-priority' it starts a Windows service as soon as the computer switches to the login screen, without high-priority, nothing happens until after fully logged in (Windows will start the program at its own leisure, it uses the registry here and not a service, so usually it takes a few seconds after login).

Originally posted by Aeosura:

Also, a correction, the 2-minute boot time started happening after disabling auto-start. With auto-start enabled Windows would hang infinitely, with 15 minutes being the longest I've ever waited before forcing the PC into repair/troubleshoot mode.

Perhaps it's some kind of other interference between programs after all. I.e. I mentioned Afterburner in the beginning, but maybe there is something else that could cause similar issues. From your application the only wildcard would be NZXT's CAM though, I'm pretty sure the other ones are fine.