I have a hp 2210 all in one printer. Its hooked up via usb to my pc and I havent had any serious problems with it for a long time.

The problem is that when i boot up with the printer attached, Windows does not fully load. The wallpaper comes up, but nothing else loads. When this first happenend, i thought i had a crash or something, but then i unplugged the printer, and my pc booted up fine. If i boot up my pc without the printer attached then it works fine. If i attach the printer to my pc after its on, then the printer and pc both work fine. Basically the problem is that i cant leave my printer plugged in unless i dont have to ever reboot my pc. Its getting kinda annoying now, so im wondering if anyone has any ideas about this. Of coures i have uninstalled then reinstalled the printer, but that did not make any difference. I also tried the slighly newer hp drivers from their site and that did not make a difference either. Its really weird. I was thinking that maybe i have a corrupt windows usb driver or something weird like that? But that doesnt really make sense cause my other usb stuff works fine. And yes I have of course plugged it into another usb port. [I have 8]
My printer is out of hp warrenty, but i talked to them over live chat, and they basically told me **** all. Just to check under msconfig and see if the little hp helper progy was starting up with windows. [i had disabled it a while ago with startup cop]
If anyone has any ideas about this at all please post 'em. Id be happy to provide any info you might care to know about this problem. i doubt my specs matter for this but i have

2.8 p4 northwood
120 gb hd
1 GB 3200 RAM

found this possibility:

what is the status of your WIA (Windows Image Acquisition)?

Click Start> Run and type in services.msc
Scroll down to WIA. Stop the service.
Change the startup type to manual.

Right click the service & choose Properties to change.

it was set to automatic, and i changed it to manual and restarted with my printer attached, but windows still did not load. It a really weird problem. Let me know if you have any other ideas on this.

I just had this problem for the first time today...I do have a usb printer (Epson color stylus 740), but when i read this and unplugged it, I still get the same wallpaper only desktop. If anyone can point me in the right direction...please do. I am going to reformat anyway because i'm getting a new motherboard and want to start fresh, but i'd like to be able to burn some files so i can save them.

i found that when i got the the desktop, i could ctrl-alt-del and from the taskmon, i could go file, run and run stuff. Give that a try

yeah i began to run stuff and figured out that explorer.exe was having trouble starting...so i ran it and the desktop appeared. Too bad i have to do that every time i boot up. But like i said, i'm reformatting anyway.