The Tenuous Link

I recently did another upgrade install from XP. This time it was from a reasonably clean XP Media Center Edition (plus all of the current offerings from Windows Update). After the update to Vista there was a problem that I hadn't seen before: a 30 second delay during boot up.

I opened the "Event Log" and looked in the Windows -> System section and saw that a service called the User Profile Hive Cleanup Service (aka UPHClean) was failing to start "in a timely manner". A little bit of Googling shows that this service is an add-on to XP that is not compatible with Vista.

I disabled the service which fixed the boot up delay, but it seemed a bit untidy to leave the dead service. Googling around I noticed someone mention that you can't just run the uninstaller; before running the uninstaller you should find UPHClean.exe, right click, choose Properties > Compatibility and choose "Windows XP Service Pack 2". Then in Programs and Features there is an uninstall option, which runs. I did that, but the uninstaller didn't remove anything. To do the clean up by hand use the 'sc' command to remove the services from the list, and then delete the UHPClean folder from Program Files.

// posted by Steven @ 2:41 PM