I experience this when the networking cable of my Win98 PC is unplugged. It happens because the loading of the OS seems to halt until the operation of the DHCP client fails, which can take more than a minute sometimes.

In this case I don't have a any networking card installed. So there shouldn't be any DHCP lookup taking place.

There are some other drivers that cause this behaviour. unfortunately I'm no or due which drivers. I have the same experience on some computers, from s7 to s478.

I've experienced it after swapping a lot of hardware around before. There's several ways to fix it. 1st thing you want to do is boot into safemode. then go device manager in safe mode and remove phantom hardware. You might see duplicate entries and even hardware you removed before that isn't there. if its still slow after that post here since its a complex thing to solve, which sometime involves resetting the bios to default settings, changing the bios settings from pnp OS to NO pnp os, and disabling onboard hardware like serial and parallel ports etc. Also if you can post a screen shot of you system properties the IRQ sharing part.

Maybe your Windows is messing around with the swapfile... flash cards tends to be very slow when writing files.

Note that removing phantom hardware as suggested above is not always sufficient. There are network adapter entries in windows registry that don't show up anywhere, but it seems Windows may process them at boot time. I found it out after testing multiple wifi cards on my PIII rig. Removing phantom drivers or even registry entries didn't help and I had to reinstall the system. I also encountered weird issues like WPA/PSK not being available for selection, only WEP. In that case driver installation of one wifi card broke setup of another card. Uninstallation/reinstallation of drivers didn't help. Do not test new hardware on your main rig.

I once had this start happening seemingly inexplicably and it was driving me mad. Then I realized my AWE64 gold was loading a 28MB sound font every boot and it took ages! Removing the sound font each time before I shutdown the computer eliminated the problem.

null

Zup wrote on 2021-08-20, 09:27:

Maybe your Windows is messing around with the swapfile... flash cards tends to be very slow when writing files.

Yah if you turn off too soon or half booted it can crap the swapfile and it takes forever on boot fixing it.

aha2940 wrote on 2021-08-20, 04:47:

I experience this when the networking cable of my Win98 PC is unplugged. It happens because the loading of the OS seems to halt until the operation of the DHCP client fails, which can take more than a minute sometimes.

I used to have this problem back when my Win98 PC was connected to the network. I recall this was exactly why I set the OS to static IP.

when drivers are removed entries aren't always removed from the registry. Also the registry does fragment. A registry repair from dos may help. But not from backup those should be removed from time to time and only used in system faliures.
There were early versions of registry repairs one was regclean.exe from microsoft. sysinternals supplied a tool to defrag registries.
Perhaps if we kept a registry backup from the first initial install of windows when all updates applied before adding drivers then that in itself can be used to revert to a smaller healthier registry after each hardware handling session. Sound fun?
(in relation to expansion boards)