I often see this error message “At least one service or driver failed during system startup. Use Event Viewer to examine the event log for details” in Windows NT and 2000 when I was working in a computer learning center where Windows 2000 Server are frequently being installed for students to use.
At least one service or driver failed during system startup Fix
This usually happens when a software or driver doesn’t get uninstalled correctly or the uninstaller doesn’t remove the startup entry from services. It’s no big problem because when you click the OK button, the error message will go away and you’ll never be bothered by this error message until you restart Windows.

There are times that this problem must fixed because I’d have to wait for more than 5 minutes before this message pops out! It’s unacceptable that a computer takes more than 5 minutes to boot in to Windows.

There’s no 100% of fixing this error and the most I can only guide you on where to check for the fault and fix it to stop this error message “At least one service or driver failed during system startup. Use Event Viewer to examine the event log for details” from popping out again.

You can use Event Viewer to locate the error message. You can run Event Viewer from Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Event Viewer. By default it has 3 categories. Application, Security and System. Usually Security is empty. So you only need to check in Application and System.

Another way is to open service manager and sort by startup type. You can run Service Manager from Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Services.
Services Sort by Startup Type
Go through all the services that are set to automatic and make sure they are started. It is normal at “some” times that a service will start automatically and then stop but not always.

To make this job easy, Steven Wiseman from IntelliAdmin has created a great script that will go through all services on a system and spit out the ones that are set to automatic and have not started. The script is not perfect. Sometimes manual services are started by other services at startup, and those will not show up with the script. Still – it is another tool that will help you save time when diagnosing a problem.

You must run command line and use cscript.exe to execute the script. For example:
cscript.exe ListFailedServices.vbs
You have to make sure that you’re in the directory of where the ListFailedServices.vbs is at otherwise you’ll get an error message saying “Input Error: Can not find script file C:\……ListFailedServices.vbs“.

The below is an example of the output from the script. Just take note of the “Caption” and you can easily locate it in Service Manager.
List of Failed Services

[ Download ListFailedServices.vbs Script | Source ]

[tags]service, driver, error, startup[/tags]