Over the last couple months, my wife’s work computer has been plagued with an issue upon Windows 10 booting, a screen popup up showing the text shown below:
Phase 0 : Starting Watch Dog Initialization :
Phase 0 : Loading Config. . . (roots, krnl, setup)
Phase 0 : Pre initialization events.
Phase 0 : Creating watch Dog dynamic key list.
Phase 0 : subsystems initialization.
Phase 0 : finished.
Phase 1 : Initialize components …
Phase 1 : Starting reactor …
Phase 1 : Starting components …
Phase 1 : Starting internal subsystems …
Phase 1 : Starting command channels …
Phase 1 : Srm start actions …
Phase 1 : Starting external subsystems …
Phase 1 : finished …
The computer would then simply freeze never getting past this point. At times the system would simply have to be restarted and it would work, other times it would take an hour of restarting to be able to access safe mode and get Windows booting again.
A bit of a side topic but I really do miss the simplicity of getting into safe mode with versions previous to Windows 10. Gone are the days of simply mashing F8 and selecting your option, you now have to wade around a myriad of options to be able to find the safe mode boot option. This, in general, seems like a huge oversight in Windows 10, removing simplicity and replacing it with a completely asinine process. Several times I actually found that mashing F8 to get into the recovery screen of Windows 10 only worked sometimes and definitely not every time. Granted it probably would have been much simpler had I been onsite with a recovery thumb drive or disc. But back to the bigger issue.
After a couple weeks, the problem seemed to completely go away, we decided to paused the uninstallation of AVG since we were no longer having the issue.
Then on Sunday, my aunt calls with the same issue. It took a bit of work but we were able to get Windows booted into safe mode, I looked around and couldn’t find any similarities between the two machines. We again chalked it up to a conflict in Windows 10 possibly due to a recent update and AVG itself. We reboot and for the next two hours was unable to get safe mode, the recovery dashboard or Windows 10 to boot. I was temporarily defeated, especially once we did get safe mode to boot and have Windows report that we couldn’t use the current user to install AVG, that it need to be an admin account – even though this account was and is.
Then I asked a question I should have asked in the beginning, “Is anything plugging into the USB”? Her answer was yes, she had her USB wireless mouse receiver plugged in. We removed it and the system instantly booted into Windows. We restarted put the USB in and lo and behold the system hung itself again. Issue figured out. In the morning I asked the wife if her computer used a Logitech mouse – her reply was no…but they did use a Logitech Keyboard. However since issue on the wife’s computer hasn’t resurfaced I am unable to definitely say the issue lies with AVG, Windows 10 and Logitech‘s line of mice/keyboards.
So if you have this issue, simply unplug the Logitech device, restart and you should be able to boot back into Windows again – then worst case you can uninstall AVG and install a different anti-virus solution.
To uninstall all AVG head over to AVG and download their removal tool: http://www.avg.com/us-en/utilities