I've got no such pause. Whatever causes it is not inherent in Systray, meaning that scenarios exist in which no pause occurs.

(The biggest time hog in my Win98SE system actually is SCANREGW.)

Maybe defragmenting your hard drive will help?

Cloudschatze wrote:

Thankfully, there is one related registry key, containing a single hexadecimal value - with no description regarding its usage. Thanks, Microsoft!

Which key is that, and how did you find it?

Or, is there more to it, and I'm courting disaster here?

What's the worst that could happen? After all, it's not like you're using this machine for important work.

NewRisingSun wrote:

I've got no such pause. Whatever causes it is not inherent in Systray, meaning that scenarios exist in which no pause occurs.

I imagine hardware differences probably need to be taken into account as well. In any event, here is at least one anecdotal account of the same "problem" (albeit, of a longer duration):

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!original/mi … M4/mby9pQIIbXcJ

(The biggest time hog in my Win98SE system actually is SCANREGW.)

I have those other, purportedly "essential," startup items disabled as well, including ScanReg. Some tweaking was necessary though - Because TaskMonitor has been disabled, "defrag" has been configured to not use the TaskMon-generated application profile, via registry-edit.

Jorpho wrote:

Maybe defragmenting your hard drive will help?

No, it doesn't seem to be disk related. This is a pretty bare-bones installation right now, consuming a little over a gigabyte of data, but yes, I did check to see if fragmentation might be involved.

Which key is that, and how did you find it?

This is the relevant key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Applets\SysTray\Services

There is some available information concerning changing the key value to achieve specific results (system-hang resolution, disabling the volume control, etc.), but nothing describing the correlation of the actual values to specific services. As such, I haven't modified the existing value at all.

Now, admittedly, this is a non-issue. Rather than disable SysTask, another solution would have been to simply make the "working-in-background" mouse pointer the same as the "normal" pointer, thereby disguising the goings-on. 😀 The real problem is that I now really want to know what SysTask is doing, and even the Windows 98 Resource Kit is coming up short of answers.

Filemon and Regmon would be the way to go, though you might have to do some digging to find versions that will work with Windows 98, and persuading them to run before startup might take some doing. (Maybe you can use the old trick of renaming them as screensavers, and then wait for the screensaver to activate at the login prompt?) I think there should be a version of Autoruns for Win9x that also ought to be helpful.

Opened-up Systray.exe in a hex editor last night, and basically confirmed that it's completely unnecessary in my configuration.

The Windows 98SE version (4.10.2222) enables the following system tray services:

- Power Status/Notification
- PC Card Status/Notification
- Volume Control
- USB Error Notification

The Windows 95 OSR2 version of Systray.exe (4.00.1111) lacks the USB notification features, and by substituting it into the Windows 98SE build, also resolves the "working-in-background" startup issue. Presumably, use of an earlier Windows 98 version might also provide the same result, and while I could do some additional testing to definitively find out, I continue to simply favor its exclusion.

Wow, that delay always bugged me too. I have had Systray.exe as the only startup service enabled in msconfig for a long time now. I can't wait to try implanting the 95 version into 98 to see what happens. This is big news on the w98se front 🤣...

Does disabling power management (I think it's in the screen saver options?) make any difference? I never liked power management.

No, I already had all power-management features disabled. It very much seems to be the USB notification funcationality in the 4.10.2222 version of SysTray that is to blame. I did take a look at the Windows 98 SysTray version (4.10.1998), and while it, like the Windows 95 version, also lacks the USB features, it requires a different version of BATMETER.DLL than the one included in 98SE. Not wanting to replace and re-register a DLL that I don't care about, I didn't test any further.

SNDVOL32.EXE is much more flexible when run separately, given the command-line switches, so unless you care about the PCMCIA and power-notification features, I highly recommend disabling Systray.exe altogether, rather than even bothering with the Windows 95 version substitution.

I vacillated about the use of Windows' volume control, but finally decided to just use Creative's mixer applications for the installed AWE64 Gold and SB Live!, and include shortcuts for them in the Quick Launch Bar area. The Windows option would have been to create two shortcuts to the SNDVOL32.EXE mixer instead (specifying the -d0 or -d1 switch for the respective soundcard).