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Tonight I was using my gaming computer to play Hitman 2 and we had a freak lightning storm. The power went out for about 5 seconds and came back on. I restarted my computer and it got to the Dell start up screen and froze....I left it on and about 10-15 minutes later Windows started up.

Well...to make a long story short, every time I start it up, it does the same thing now. Obviously what happened must have done some damage. I have a surge protector but I'm guessing it did nothing.

Does anyone have any ideas on this?

Sometimes, a lightning strike can leave a residual ESD somewhere in the works, usually in one of the cables or connectors.

I'd start by turning off your computer, waiting a couple of minutes, then turning off the power supply in back of your machine for a couple of minutes.

If that doesn't work, try it again, only this time, turn off everything you've got connected to your machine, then turn off the surge protector for a couple of minutes.

If that doesn't work, try it all again, then disconnect everything you have hooked up to your computer, unplug your computer & anything else from the surge protector, then unplug the surge protector from the wall, wait a couple of minutes, then put it all back together.

The grounding in my neighborhood is pretty terrible, so I make it a point to cycle the power periodically.

Thanks LilCerberus, that may have had something to do with it.

It was the strangest thing....I spent hours messing around with it...running diagnostics, scans, Safe Mode, Dell.com....I shut it off and restarted it nearly 8 times in all of this and it was between 10-20 minutes for Windows to start up each time. I was about to give up when I discovered that Dell systems have diagnostic lights on the front and based on what lights come on and what color they are, you can get an idea of what's wrong...so I shut it off to restart it so I could see the lights that would come on when it hung...It started right up. I shut it off and restarted it numerous times without a problem.

The only thing I noticed through all of this is we were having terrible rain and my Directv box kept losing the signal. The computer and the box cleared up right around the same time. I know from experience that the Directv box will lose signal if heavy rain clouds get in the way OR if there is too much power being drawn from the circuit that the box is plugged into. I have been through this years ago and discovered this was an issue to deal with and it was basically because of the poor wiring and such in my house (I now have the box running on its own circuit)....but now this gets me to thinking...we had a lightning strike that caused the power to go out and then come back...it affected the computer and obviously the Directv box (which I thought was just due to clouds). So I am guessing there must have been something going on with the power running through the wires in my house...uneven power feed or something (possible?) and once that cleared up, the box and the computer did as well. Very weird.

Anyway, thanks for trying to help me LilCerberus.

When you say "for Windows to come up" or start, do you mean for Windows to even START loading, or for Windows to be done loading?

If it was taking Windows that long to even START loading, I'd be surprised if it came up at all.  I am guessing you mean for Windows to be 'ready.'

If that's the case: You are using wireless, right?  Do you have any networking security policies in place (that you know of)?

Windows gets "confused" easily on boot-up, especially with networking stuff and configuration settings related to what they call "policies."  The problem is that Windows does not tell you "hey, I'm having trouble with this, can ya fix it?"  Know, the geniuses at Redmond assumed you were too stupid to understand such a message anyway, so why bother telling you what is gonig on?  Rather, Windows tries, over and over and over, never communicating something is wrong.  It may 'time out' after a while and boot up, but this, as you observed, can take a while.  I've seen this WIndows behavior on systems set up for a particular network environment that Windows did not find upon start-up.

If you are using wireless and have one of these "internal" policies set, and your wireless network was not working, I could well imagine Windows going into mental overload.  I don't KNOW that's what happened, but it rings familiar with things I've seen, and your comments about it working later when the sat tv started working suggests something of this kind.

By point is that IF the hang-up was while Windows was loading (ie, not keeping Windows FROM beginning to load), I doubt it is hardware related directly....most of the key hardware should have checked out by then during the POST and BIOS boot.  An notable exception, of course, is anything that requires a "driver" to run, like the network card, and so if there WAS some residual electrical effect, it was likely that Windows just could not communicate properly with that hardware (wireless net, I'm looking at you, since the symptom cleared with evidence from another wireless device returning to proper duty).  Again, rather than simply telling you "hey, your NIC (or whatever) is not working right," Windows has coniptions.

If the problem was power supply, mainboard, CPU, memory or disk getting fried by the lightning, you would not have made it past the ROM boot.  Those things don't usually recover after they get damaged.

Glad you got 'er fixed.

I would hit the start button and it would run for about 5 seconds and go to the black Dell screen that it always runs through (it says something about loading BIOS and has F2 and F12 selections) on start up. That screen normally lasts about a second and then it goes to the screen that says Windows XP as it is loading Windows. Well, last night, it would just hang up on the black Dell screen and not even go to the Windows screen for 10-20 minutes...once it did hit the Windows XP screen, it loaded a little slower than normal but it wasn't that bad. Once the thing was all loaded up and running...no problems at all.

The network was working though because I was running my laptop off it...it had to be something going on and at first, I really did figure I baked something...but obviously there was some issue that was causing Windows to get confused as you said.