Had a stupid problem with logging into Windows on my laptop for a while now. As soon as I finish entering my password and hit enter, the machine gets stuck at "Loading Personal Settings" for over a minute, with very little disk activity. I finally decided to try to fix it.
The most helpful bit of info I came across was a registry setting. Adding a DWORD at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ SOFTWARE\ Microsoft\ Windows\ CurrentVersion\ policies\ system\ verbosestatus
After adding the value, I saw that the delay was at the "reconnecting network drives" stage, which was a dead giveaway. After logging in, I checked My Computer and saw a mapped drive to a drive that was only available on the company network (not at home). Unmapped it, and now back to normal.