As has been noted, the idea that Windows 8 boots quickly is an illusion. Once the Start screen appears there is still much going on. You can see this if you watch your mouse cursor or your hard drive activity. I have found that I sometimes get problems (explorer restarting or hanging, etc.) if I try to run something before Windows is actually fully loaded (even before I installed Fences).

What I have found with regard to the Fences problem in this item that has worked for me has been to use task manager and disable Fences from the Startup tab. Now Windows starts fairly quickly (although there is still lots of activity). When I go to desktop my icons are all displayed right on the desktop. Right clicking on the desktop starts up Fences with all the groupings (although sometimes a right click makes all the icons disappear, with a reappearance in proper groups with a double left click).

A curious thing that I have found on both my laptop and my desktop is that every time I have installed Fences it puts two identical entries into the Startup tab on Task Manger. I speculate that this double entry might have something to do with the start up problems when I enable Fences in Startup. This is how I hit on the work around of disabling Fences in the Startup tab.

Just thought I'd add my voice to this problem.  Love Fences, it's an indispensable part of my windows experience.

I get a delay of 15-20 seconds for my Win8 desktop to become operational with Fences v2.01 installed.

It's running on an ASUS Zenbook UX31A, SSD 128gb, 4gb ram, Win 8 (x64)

This is a shame due to how fast this machine otherwise boots.  The delay I receive after the logon screen is in the order of 15-20 seconds.  Without Fences, that delay is about 1 second.

On my desktop system with Win7 (x86), the moment the desktop is available, Fences is ready as well.

I've tried many things to eliminate other startup items that are not necessary, but it has no effect on this issue.  It seems that Fences will somehow need to become a service in order to progress up the queue of startup items.

I love fences, but this is a real killer. It seems the issue can be solved simply by right clicking on the desktop and forcing fences to load immediately, but stardock needs to solve this one. Fences is a great program and I love using it, would love it to return to prominence among my favorite programs.

WIN7 64bit

I see the completed fences desktop for just a moment.

Then it dissapears and Fences is loading the desktop again, but very slowly.

Did someone see the same?

I have just done a test and had a surprising result as far as I am concerned.

Bare in mind I have only done 3 cold boots since the above post, but ...... by disabling the 2 Fences startup items in the task manager, Windows 8 (SSD install) is blisteringly fast to the W8 start screen. I know this is irrelevant, as the system isn't really usable, nor have my backgrounds tasks loaded yet.

If I click to go to desktop, I have a blank screen with just the background image, and all my backgrounds tasks load, and display in the tray (where appropriate). The admittedly limited number of cold boots that I have done, have worked perfectly. Same goes for reboots, and logging out and in again.

The surprising thing for me, which I quite like actually, is that Fences will still load the moment that I right click on the desktop. So this will become my workaround. I will leave Fences disabled in the startup, and just right click on the desktop to display the fences. After that Fences work as normal, where you double left click or swipe to hide certain fences.

So it now loads instantly for you ? I have the same trouble that it does not load sometimes and that it takes too long to load explorer crashes

If i understood correctly all you did was opening the comand promt. via admin priviledge from the taskmanager or from the apps directly.

1. press windows key - type run / press windows+R
2. enter taskmgr / press enter
3. open rider file / create or run new task
4. type cmd / and check the administrative priviledges box.

from there you added / sc create Fences binPath="%ProgramFiles(x86)%\Stardock\Fences\Fences.exe" start=auto ?
but fences was or is already set as auto...
 

Mhh did you contact Stardock about this yet ?
You disabled the autostart and replaced by another service with tha same attribute that is system boot or autostart.
I just tried IRC support but support time already passed if not you could write them a mail. 
Alright just got to talk to a mod in IRC and he is passing your post to the devs.
 

Unfortunately that does not work for me. The service is there and it's set to auto, but the service does not start on boot.

If I now go to the services and try to start the service manually, it will not start, just errors out.

I have just installed the new beta (2.11), restored everything to normal, and fences appears to crash Windows Explorer, and prevent my start up items loading, so no change there.

I have gone back to my method I stated in an earlier post. Disable the Fences startup items, boot the system, then at any time after that just right click on the desktop and my fences load.

There definitely something that Fences does not like about my system, even though I did a W8 refresh a while back.

I do have another problem which I reported maybe a year ago, but no solution was found via tech support. If I right click on any program shortcut within a fence, select open file location, nothing happens. I have to select 'properties' instead then 'open file location' from the pop up window that appears. But this is off-topic ......

I did quick search on the error below, and a very quick scan of the results says this error relates to Net Framework 1.1, and occurs when trying to Stop a service ....... not starting one. TBH I cannot be bothered to try and track the error down at the moment. It's too hot, and I have other things to do ....

I restarted twice, one of them being a total shut down.

I only manually tried to start the service because it did not start automatically. In the picture above you can see it's not running, even though it's on auto.

C'est la vie ...... there must be mutual hatred between my PC and Fences

Thanks for effort

I can't see this working unfortunately, as that key is actually created when the service is created by the elevated command prompt. I have just used the command below, and the reg key in your post was created

sc create Fences binPath="%ProgramFiles(x86)%\Stardock\Fences\Fences.exe" start=auto

Cheers

EDIT:

It shows a start up value in the image I have just added above. That key was created by the elevated command prompt method

Passing along to the devs

Hi,

I thought I'd comment on this as I've just spent the evening trying to fix my slow starting Fences (Win 7 x64), and seem to have succeeded.

I noticed that Fences started up quickly at work but not at home, which got me thinking about what shortcuts I had on the desktop.

I removed all shortcuts that pointed to remote documents/folders/servers. This seems to have resolved the issue.

It seems as though Fences tries to locate the item pointed to by a shortcut when the shortcut is added to a fence (or at startup). If the place where the item should be doesn't exist (because it's on a server that isn't reachable) then it seems to hang Explorer.

I would guess that the more unreachable shortcuts you have, the slower Fences will be to load - but that's supposition.

Hopefully this will be useful to others. It may even be relevant to you Windows 8 guys.

Chris.