Windows 7 - Windows Explorer (user interface / desktop) not starting a

As of late, when I reboot one of my Windows 7 computers, it does not present me with the user interface (desktop) anymore after the login.

Rather, I have to start the task manager and then terminate the explorer.exe process that is running and then start a new explorer.exe process from task manager in order to be presented with the desktop.

If I start any other programs from task manager prior to having successfully started explorer.exe (which sometimes takes several attempts as described above), those programs do not have Internet access until I explorer.exe is running.

Neither Norton Security nor MBAM nor Spybot 1.6.2 nor the Eset Online Scanner found anything out of the ordinary, nor did an SFC /scanall.

And in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon, SHELL is pointing to explorer.exe

Any suggestions how to proceed from here to get my normal system behavior back?

PS: I also tried to perform a System Restore to the state before the recent set of updates pushed by Microsoft, but even though it claims to have performed said system restore, System Restore continues to list various restore points that were created thereafter.

Never mind. I think I figured it out. The computer rebooted itself over night last night, installing Windows updates. When I looked at the event viewer log entries, there was one application that took about 4 minutes to time out before the computer continued with its regular boot process.

As a hunch, I configured the respective 3 entries for said application in Services to be "Automatic (Delayed Start)" instead of "Automatic", et voila, booting and login are back to normal.

Now I'll just have to get a hold of the software's manufacturer and let them know that their last update of said software is somewhat buggy.