A couple weeks ago I started having this incredibly annoying issue with my Windows 10 PC. Basically, every time I’d boot up or wake the computer from sleep, it would just randomly freeze on the login screen right after entering my password. The spinning dots would sometimes appear, sometimes not-sometimes the screen would just turn black, and I’d sit there waiting for minutes with nothing happening. I thought maybe it was just a fluke, so I tried restarting, but it kept happening. A few times, the main desktop loaded, but then none of the icons would respond. I couldn’t even open Task Manager with Ctrl+Shift+Esc.
I did the usual things first-Googled it, read some Reddit threads, and tried booting into Safe Mode. In Safe Mode, everything worked fine, so I figured it must be something that starts up with Windows. I disabled all my startup apps using Task Manager, but after rebooting, still got stuck at the login screen. I then tried the “sfc /scannow” command in Command Prompt (ran as administrator), but it didn’t find anything. I ran Windows Update just in case; all my drivers and the system itself were up-to-date. I also tried unplugging all USB peripherals (someone suggested a faulty USB device could cause freezes) and even reseated my RAM-no luck.
At this point, I started thinking it must be some sort of corrupted user profile or maybe OneDrive or some other cloud service causing conflicts. A few people mentioned disabling Fast Startup, which I did via Control Panel > Power Options > Choose what the power buttons do > Change settings that are currently unavailable > uncheck “Turn on fast startup.” Still, the freeze kept happening.
What finally did it-and this is something I haven’t seen mentioned in most guides-was clearing out the “NVIDIA Shader Cache.” I have an NVIDIA graphics card, and apparently, after a recent driver update, there was some corruption in the shader cache folder that was tripping up the login process. Here’s how I did it:
- Booted into Safe Mode (Shift + Restart from the login screen > Troubleshoot > Advanced options > Startup Settings).
- Navigated to C:\Users[YourUsername]\AppData\Local\NVIDIA\DXCache and C:\Users[YourUsername]\AppData\Local\NVIDIA\GLCache.
- Deleted all the files in both folders (don’t worry, they’ll be automatically recreated as needed).
- Rebooted normally.
The first reboot took a little longer than normal, but after that, everything loaded up perfectly and I haven’t had the issue since.
So, if you’re having weird freezes at the login screen and nothing else is fixing it, definitely check if you have an NVIDIA graphics card and try clearing the shader cache. Wish I’d discovered that sooner-would have saved me a lot of frustration! Hope this helps someone else.
