Window 10 Loads "Please Wait" Indefinitely

Question

After 4 weeks of normal operation, I restarted a Windows 10 Pro 64bit virtual machine tonight, and it has now been loading the Please Wait screen for 8 hours. Because it is a virtual machine, I can see that the resource-use is very low, despite this delay.

The progress indicator is one of those animated gif types that doesn't really indicate any percentage-completion of progress. This fake-progress-animation continues to spin around, but I'm becoming worried it won't finish.

This installation of Windows 10 had been updated and restarted frequently; at least 3 times a week, I've manually checked for updates (even though it is set to do updates automatically).

So far, out of the many Windows 10 upgrades I've done, this is the first to exhibit any apparent hanging on this please-wait screen. My concern is that this will happen to other workstations, where waiting an hour for a boot is unacceptable, due to the urgency of the work done by the employee using that workstation.

That's why I'm posting here. If there is any proper way to skip past this waiting (postponing it to off-time hours), I need to know it.

Update:

For this virtual machine, I finally powered it off improperly and it did come to a login screen after powering it back on. However, (as I anticipated last night) I just received support ticket from a user having the same problem. At this point,she has powered-off her machine improperly multiple times, but each boot it still won't allow her past the "Please Wait" screen. So far, she has been unable to login this morning.

Solution

1. Boot into safemode
2. Turn off Windows Updates

Comments

[Admin]

just turn off windows updates

[Admin]

@Jay: How (without being able to log in)?

[Admin]

Boot into safemode and turn them off from there