Massive boot delay, Win7

[Darxide]

This only started happening lately, and I haven't installed anything that I can think off.
The problem is the boot up. It gets to the welcome screen pretty fast as you'd expect with an SSD. But then I get a black screen with just a cursor for several minutes before the desktop appears.
I used msconfig to turn off startup items one by one, but nothing cured it. However, if I change to 'diagnostic startup' loading only the basics, it boots super fast.
So how do I find out what's causing the delay? Obviously something is taking an eternity to load, but I can't find what it is.

[AMDforME]

Sounds like a hardware driver issue to me. If you've done any hardware driver, Win 7, anti-virus, etc. udpates that might be the issue. These things can be a real PITA to track down.

[Scubar]

I had something similar not long ago with Windows XP machines where Intel decided to release crappy drivers for their chipset. It would install an LMS and SOL service iirc which then for some reason started writing to the file C:\Windows\System32\config\DEFAULT and its meant to be either 256 or 512KB in size but due to this piss poor driver it grew and grew until it would cause the boot process to hang. One PC it got upto about 100MB in size and caused the PC to take 40mins to boot.

May be worth checking this file against a machine that doesnt have the the issue just incase.

[Darxide]

Thanks guys. It is proving very hard to track down, but I do now have a suspect. The network. Either the driver, or some network protocol related to my home server.
I updated my graphics driver to the latest Catalyst beta, and disconnected my home server. I know, I shouldn't have done both at the same time. Because now it's 'sort of' cured, and I don't know which of those 2 actions fixed it.
But. The reason I suspect the network, is although the desktop now appears super fast, black screen for 5 minutes is cured, it's a good minute before I can use it. The little network icon in the system tray has the blue circle spinning over it all that time, suggesting it's trying to make a connection. As soon as that clears, the desktop finishes loading, sidebar etc. And I can use it.
Thing is, I have a few laptops that also connect automatically to the home server, and they don't have this issue. So it could be the driver for my network adapter is taking a long time to load. I guess I'll keep playing about with it.

[GunGod]

Thanks guys. It is proving very hard to track down, but I do now have a suspect. The network. Either the driver, or some network protocol related to my home server.
I updated my graphics driver to the latest Catalyst beta, and disconnected my home server. I know, I shouldn't have done both at the same time.

You can always reconnect and test, bad Wifi drivers cause me lot of trouble and performance issues in past. Not any time newer driver is better especially for old hardware so try play with them.