smssinit service slowing down windows boot

[mikef]

I back up to a USB3 flash drive. If I forget to remove it and it's plugged in when I boot, the Windows boot time goes out from less than 10 seconds to several minutes. Looking at the event log, the degradation is down to smssinit.

Is there another way to avoid this degradation - other than always remove the USB3 drive before booting?

Asus P6X58D Premium, i7-950, 12GB Kingston 1600 XMP RAM, 240GB OCZ SSD

 

[Gorman]

The SMSSInit subphase begins when the kernel passes control to the session manager process (Smss.exe). During this subphase, the system initializes the registry,loads and starts the devices and drivers that are not marked BOOT_START, and starts the subsystem processes. SMSSInit ends when control is passed to Winlogon.exe.

I would have to pin the blame on the driver for the drive being slow to load or the USB3 controller driver. Try updating them both if updates are availiable.

 

[mikef]

Thanks - I'll take a look at that