This morning, we rebooted our Server 2008 R2 box. No problem, came right back up. Then we shut it down and let it install windows updates. While it was off, we added some RAM. Then we turned it back on.

The system came right back up to the "press ctrl-alt-delete" screen, so far, so good.

I logged in. The system got as far as "Applying Group Policy" -- then spent almost an hour applying drive mappings. Finally finished that, and has now spent 30 minutes on waiting for the Event Notification Service.

I still haven't been able to log in. Remote desktop service doesn't appear to be running yet.

I tried viewing the event log from another machine. I see that the box is writing to the Security log, but there are no events in System or Application in the last 45 minutes.

Digging through the System log of events from 45 minutes ago, I see a bunch of timeouts:

• A timeout (30000 milliseconds) was reached while waiting for a transaction response from the ShellHWDetection service. [lots of these]
• A timeout (30000 milliseconds) was reached while waiting for a transaction response from the wuauserv service.
• A timeout (30000 milliseconds) was reached while waiting for a transaction response from the SessionEnv service.
• A timeout (30000 milliseconds) was reached while waiting for a transaction response from the Schedule service.
• A timeout (30000 milliseconds) was reached while waiting for a transaction response from the CertPropSvc service.

What can I do? Should I try shutting it down remotely, or will that do more damage?