Windows 10

Is Windows 10 “Taking longer than expected”?

By on • ( 2 Comments )

It seems like I run into this screen way too often:

While there can be a number of causes for this (in my case, it’s usually because there’s a script that popped up a dialog that you can’t see because it’s hiding behind that screen — pretty hard to click OK when you can’t get to the button), it’s always annoying because you have to wait for a long timeout period before it continues on to the desktop.

But in many cases, there is quicker way to get out of this. Press Control-Alt-Delete to get to this screen and then choose to “Sign out”:

As long as this problematic script pop-up was a one-time thing, you can then sign back in and proceed with being productive. Of course you may still need to investigate the underlying cause if this happens frequently.

Personally, I see this as “yet another reason” to turn off the first sign-in animation (FSIA), which I usually do via unattend.xml when first installing Windows 10:

<RunSynchronousCommand wcm:action=”add”>
<Description>disable firstlogon animation for win10</Description>
<Order>5</Order>
<Path>reg add HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System /v EnableFirstLogonAnimation /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f</Path>
</RunSynchronousCommand>

Categories: Windows 10

2 replies »

  1. Do you have any idea why this is happening? I have 5 Windows 10 PCs (2 of which run Insider Builds) and I’ve probably seen this message once. Certainly haven’t seen it since the pandemic started. My work laptop takes forever to login too (not with that message, though) but I suspect that’s because it autoconnects to our domain via VPN on login (read: VPN is always on.)

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    • The most common cause is problems installing provisioned apps (assuming this happens on first logon after installing a new Insider build). Checking the appx event logs could provide some clues.

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