Had same issue with prolonged startup. I have always used fast startup and it was pretty fast. I uninstalled and reinstalled the new Norton and had the same issue. Spent a few more days working the issue and finally came to a solution. I simply started it up and waited for it to finish that process. I opened and closed a few programs then opened my duckduckgo and left it open. I shut down the system using hibernate, repeat, hibernate and it opened better that it did with fast startup. This is just a workaround until I can figure out the registry and take care of it that way. Oh yeah, my duckduckgo opened to this question when i started up again.
Have you tried with Fast Startup off?
Are you HDD or SSD?
Your issue may get better exposure by creating your own thread. OP runs W7.
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SSD and if you have Hibernate active it will be on all the time. Fast Startup is part of hibernate and if you use HIbernate to shutdown it bypasses the Fast Start and opens where you left off.
I had the same problem on my Windows 11 PC. Fortunately, it got fixed with the new update. The team did a great jog for quick bug fix!