grrrrrrrrrrr, sat up till 4.30am last night trying to work out why my pc was hanging on the windows splash screen on boot up.

even installed a new copy of vista onto my pc and that did the same thing.

event viewer was throwing up "network location awareness" errors, but it never struck me that my ethernet switch could be causing all these problems.

anyway, took the switch out today and it still didn't boot.

only when i stuck the ethernet cable directly into my pc it must have sorted out the problem and it's now back to normal.

strange.

Windows is a strange place... with anomalies that sometimes just have to go un-solved!

lol

Glad you got it sorted though... even though you don't really know how you did it!

Just disable the NLA service. Its used so that you can get a network map in the network and sharing centre.