Last night, I noticed an interesting problem on my freshly repaved Windows XP box: After Windows booted and the desktop came up, I was unable to do anything with the box for several minutes. Every time I double-clicked on an icon, the cursor would change to an hourglass for a second, then nothing. No window. No anything.

Great. First thing that came to mind is that I’ve picked up a spybot or virus, even though I run eTrust Antivirus and check the machine with Spybot Search and Destroy regularly. I scanned the machine and found no problems. What was interesting though was that I could get into a command window, so I was able to find out what processes were running, but nothing seemed wierd or suspicious.

After a short bout of tourette’s where I screamed at the computer and told it what I thought of it (like it cares), I collected myself and checked the event viewer to see if there was any sort of network failure. I was startled to find several of these entries:

Event ID: 15
Source: Disk
Description: The device, \Device\Harddisk0\D, is not ready for access yet.

Obviously (well, obvious to me) this was the source of my problems.

To make a long story short, it turned out that during my reinstall I had installed the drivers for the motherboards RAID controller, even though I don’t have any RAID drives attached. Once I disabled it in Device Manager, my timeouts went away and everything was fine.

My point: I still don’t understand how the average user gets around these types of problems.