Just last week, we had a HP proliant server which I was helping to configure. Everything was setup up as usually and upon rebooting the server, it restarted but hung with the dreaded “Applying computer settings…” dialog box. Nothing in the Internet was helpful to resolve this matter.
Tried restarting the server into save mode with networking and still we had this problem. Next we tried restart just in save mode and it got started. This makes me suspect that there is something wrong with the network card (physically) or the drivers.
It could not have been the drivers because we just rebuilt the server because it had this problem. Anyway, went into save mode and disabled all NICs and reboot the server. It came up perfectly with all the NICs disabled. Slowly, we enabled one NIC at a time and reboot the server each time.
Turned out that when we enabled the embedded NIC from the server, this hanging occured, but not on the other NIC cards. Seems like we need to get the NICs replaces with HP.
