Windows 8: Huge delay after logging in
I read Scot Hanselmans blogpost “The Internet is not a black box. Look inside. “. I remembered the article while waiting like forever today while starting my windows 8 machine. After doing my picture password login, the machine waits like 2 minutes doing nothing and then I get to finally see my desktop. I started googling and there seems to be many root causes for this problem. I tried some, but nothing worked so far.
I wanted to solve this problem professionally and so I started to search for a boot tracing tool. I found xperf and xperfview which are working Windows 8 but the analysis was not that enlightened. The graphics show no CPU or IO usage for roughly 120 seconds. This phase is called “winlogon init”. Then I found an inspiring blog from a Microsoft Dude about Windows Performance Analyzer. I decided to give it a try. Download the Assessment and Deployment Kit and make sure to select only the performance toolkit:
The next step is to open the Windows Performance Recorder (=Windows-Leistungsaufzeichung) and to select the Start-Szenario. I selected a bunch of other profiles as well and I am not sure about some, so your mileage may vary!
When you press start, the system enabled the boot-tracing and restarts. After restarting, it finishes the tracing, disables itself and you have huge trace file: 
I opened this file in the Windows Performance Analyzer (takes some minutes as well) and the result is very impressive:
To get to this picture above:
- I double clicked the “System Activity” graph in the top left
- I selected the time, which I think, is the time, where my notebooks just waits.
- I enabled the table data view through the small control on the top right corner
- And Finally, I ordered by start time ascending
“But wait, there is more” … clicking the small icon left of System Activity reveals much more diagrams. Looks like this article is only some kind of “I can only show you the door”-article J
…so maybe my problem is related to “Subscriber: Profiles”?
At this point I was completely lost in all these data. I uploaded the trace and asked Jeff kindly to take a look. He was very helpful, suggesting to disable the SSDP service (because it is a domain joined machine) and a BIOS update. In the meantime I also removed all virtual network stuff from the Windows Phone 8 emulator (just a wild guess).
Finally my machine logs in without waiting and I hope it stay that way. Thanks Jeff!