Do I blame XP or Novell or both?

[vakkotaur]

At work I occasionally have a problem booting my primary computer. It takes longer than normal to boot, and then eventually shows me the desktop wallpaper, but no icons. If I wait a while long a window opens up and looks like it's running through a script (which is normal) and then stops with a few lines of "An unexpected error has occurred." And that's that. Nothing more. I can't close the window as the close button and the corner buttons are grey-out and inactive. All I can do is give the machine the three-fingered salute and tell it to shut down and then try again. Sometimes I get to go through this a couple times.

I'm not sure if this an XP weirdness (the 95 box doesn't do it, for what that's worth) or if the Novell networking is to blame for the weirdness, or if they just don't get along all the time. I'm not sure, but it might be something trying to reach a network resource that's in use and not responding very fast. I get the feeling, but am not certain, that this happens the later I start the computer and that the mealier I boot it the less likely I am to run into this. Since it's an intermittent problem, it's not that easy to confirm one way or the other very quickly.

I wonder, also, just what errors the system is expecting if it tells me about unexpected errors. Aren't all errors unexpected? Oh yeah, I forgot, this is Windows. Oops. Still, it's frustrating to see this after having dealt with MS-DOS, PC-DOS, FreeDOS, Window 3.1, Windows for Workgroups 3.11, Windows 95, Windows 2000 Professional, RedHat Linux, Mandrake Linux, muLinux, Vector Linux, DeLi Linux, OS/2, HP-UX, and FreeBSD at home and never having running to this "Hi, I'll only almost boot for you. Ha-ha!" problem.