The symptoms of my problem is exactly like the ones explained in this thread http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/itproxpsp/thread/d3aea278-faa8-40a4-a86b-ca0ae672ae47 . Except that mine is windows7 and his is XP and he didn't really get a working solution. The screen would go black for about 3 minutes between the starting up windows logo screen and the login screen. This started last night after my computer was forced to restart due to windows update. The only thing out of the ordinary that I usually do on my computer is that I bought a logitech webcam and installed the drivers for it. Nothing went wrong and the webcam works perfectly fine so I doubt that is the problem. Also, I was playing MineCraft before the computer restarted on me and after it restart, I am now unable to load MineCraft again on its website. I uninstalled and reinstalled Java but it did no good. I tested Java to see if it was working and there were no problems, I just can't seem to run MineCraft which is odd because it was working perfectly fine before the restart. This has never happened before. I put this computer together half a year ago with new parts so I'm a little paranoid if it is a hardware issue or not. The computer works fine, it's just that the long black screen worries me because it has never happened before and it doesn't seem like windows should be doing that, at least not for 3 minutes. And MineCraft being unable to load after the reboot just doesn't seem right. Did something happen in the recent windows update? Thank you for taking your time and reading this.

Can you boot into Safe Mode to determine if it's the drivers which are the issue? http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/force-windows-to-boot-into-safe-mode-without-using-the-f8-key/ If you can get it to function correctly in Safe Mode, then it's likely (3rd party) driver related, in which you'll want to check with the vendors for any devices you have installed (that webcam) & see if it's a known issue with Win 7 & possibly if a fix is in the works on their product drivers site.

Once it's up and running, go into Event Viewer and see what is listed there as warning or critical events. That may give you a hint as to what is happening to cause the delay. SC Tom

This happened to me recently, after I installed many updates (at once) on a fresh install of an XP machine. It was all the high priority updates, on top of the initial XP install with SP3 slipstreamed. The problem went away by itself. Perhaps because of additional updates I installed, before delivering the laptop to the user. I doubt this is caused by hardware. I don't know anything about MineCraft. Just be sure you have the basics up to date, like flash player, shockwave player, java, .NET framework, IE8.Jay