Explorer locks up intermittently (slightly long posting!)

[Bill Woods]

This is a bit weird. Please read this slightly long posting as I
describe one weirdness at the end.

------

I am running XP Pro + SP1 and I find that what I believe is called
the "Explorer shell" seems to lock up every now and then. The lock
lasts for a couple of minutes.

I have run XP Pro for over a year but now there are these times which
seem to broadly co-incide with some applications demanding a lot of
cpu (my systen is not very powerful at 700 MHz) that I find I can not
select other apps from clicking their tabs on the taskbar or using
the ALT+TAB task switcher!

Even if I wait patiently for the task management routines in XP to
allocate a timeslice of resources to my new request, nothing really
seems to happen. And then finally the system suddenly frees itself
up and all the screen requests I made happen at once!

I had thought it might be the registry backing itself up because th
system has detected an abnormal situation but there is nothing in the
event log about these locks and I would have expected to see
any registry backups reported there.

Third party utilities, such as Powerpro, which seem to be loaded into
memory (and which normally don't seem to depend on Explorer being
free to show their menus when I bump one edge of the screen) do not
show themselves when I call for them. Pop up toolbar/menus on the
taskbar do not appear when I click on them. This is odd because this
sort of thing nealry always works no matter how bad my system is
behaving.

Also, if I try to close or to shrink Windows such as Win Explorer I
often (but not always) get no response at all. Nor can I even get
these windows to the front of the screen by clicking on them!

THE STRANGEST THING TO ME IS that if I get to a window such as my
Opera browser then I can work with it entirely normally. I can
browse the web and call up all sorts of Opera menus and functions
quite normally. But I can not get windows to open and close and to
come forward and so on as I have described.

Can anyone work out what is happening?

 

[Galen]

In

Can anyone work out what is happening?

I'm willing to take a stab at it but these are probably long-shots and given
the speed of your CPU might not make a difference.

The first question would be when was the last time you cleaned out your PC,
made sure that there were no viruses, and made sure that you didn't have any
spywar/malware lingering about on it?

The second question would be does this often happen when you're opening an
explorer window or something that contains a lot of files, and at this same
time, do you have a fully active virus scanner running in the background?
This is often the reason behind this behavior in what I've seen.

The third is going to sound a bit crazy but I've installed XP on older
systems and had virus scanning running (and numerous other things) and while
this didn't completely cure the problem - I still had to wait a moment when
opening folders containing a lot of files or large files - it did improve
the quality of life and prevented the general crashes from happening or
effecting me in any adverse way. Normally I use an application to accomplish
this but I'm guessing you probably don't want to spend any money on this. I
did a search and found this site which might have the answer:

http://www.onecomputerguy.com/explorer_tips.htm#thread

Quote from the site:

Running the Explorer in Separate Process (NT/XP Only)
Added 11/17/01

By default, the Windows Desktop, Taskbar, and Explorer run in a single
process using multiple threads. You can modify the registry so that the
Taskbar and Desktop will run in one process with each instance of Explorer
in a separate process.

1.. Start Regedit
2.. Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Software \ Microsoft \ Windows \
CurrentVersion \ Explorer
3.. Create a DWORD value called DesktopProcess
4.. Give it a value of 1
Then, of course, you'd close regedit and reboot. After that the desktop
should run in it's own instance of explorer which seemingly would mean that
you'd be using more system resources but seems to straighten this out for me
here when I've suffered similar problems.

I'd give the third one a try and see if it's any better after a reboot, a
good cleaning, a defrag, and a scan to make sure that there's nothing more
seriously wrong installed on your PC.

Galen
--
"My mind rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me
the most abstruse cryptogram or the most intricate analysis, and I am
in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense then with artificial
stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for
mental exaltation." -- Sherlock Holmes

 

[Bill Woods]

On Mon 07 Mar 2005 00:19:41, Galen wrote:

[snip]

The first question would be when was the last time you cleaned
out your PC, made sure that there were no viruses, and made sure
that you didn't have any spywar/malware lingering about on it?

The second question would be does this often happen when you're
opening an explorer window or something that contains a lot of
files, and at this same time, do you have a fully active virus
scanner running in the background? This is often the reason
behind this behavior in what I've seen.

Galen, you're a good man for answering so thoroughly.

My PC is as virus-free as I can get it. I am not lax about this.

In the last week or less, I have run on-demand scans from my old
antivirus software (Avast!) and I have run on-line scans from various
sites like Symantec and BitDefender. I have run SpyBot with latest
fixes.

I last ran a defragger (PerfectDisk) about a week ago.

But my current "locking" problem goes back a few weeks or more. In
that time I have removed Avast! and swapped it for AVG 7.

All in all I don't think I get this locking problem from a busy anti-
virus running in the background. I think i woul dhave noticed it
before now. The strange thing is that when I get the locking
TaskManager (which I keep shrunk as system tray icon) says I am not
running at full 100% cpu utilization. And indeed if I can get into
an application then it runs perfectly nicely.

It is as if XP has a 'lock manager' component which is over-
sensitised and it kicks with full locking of task switching and other
explorer functions when it is not really necessary.

The third is going to sound a bit crazy but I've installed XP on
older systems and had virus scanning running (and numerous other
things) and while this didn't completely cure the problem - I
still had to wait a moment when opening folders containing a lot
of files or large files - it did improve the quality of life and
prevented the general crashes from happening or effecting me in
any adverse way.

The problem I have is intermittent. I might get it every 15 or 20
minutes or so of keyboarding. In between the system behaves very
nicely and response times are fine. When it locks I lose the ability
to move between apps or operate the ALT+TAB task switcher for several
minutes. Even if I close Explorer using task manager and restart
Explorer I still have the problem.

Normally I use an application to accomplish
this but I'm guessing you probably don't want to spend any money
on this.

I am not saying money is no object but what application are you think
of? Do you have a link and I will check out the cots.

------

Regarding running instances of explorer as separate processes, I have
tried something like this before but the system overhead required
made my system run sluggishly. If I follow your link and some othrs
too (see below) it appears that there are several variations on this
and I will try all of them out.


Launch Windows Desktop in a Separate Process
http://www.winguides.com/registry/display.php/950/
Same as your http://www.onecomputerguy.com/explorer_tips.htm#thread

Launch Folder Windows in a Separate Process
http://www.winguides.com/registry/display.php/769/

Launch Browser Windows in a Separate Process
http://www.winguides.com/registry/display.php/964/

 

[Galen]

In Bill Woods <[email protected]> had this to say:

Inline responses:

Galen, you're a good man for answering so thoroughly.

Nah, I'm just bored.

In the last week or less, I have run on-demand scans from my old
antivirus software (Avast!) and I have run on-line scans from various
sites like Symantec and BitDefender. I have run SpyBot with latest
fixes.

I assume they all came up clean? You might consider, for the anti-spyware, a
second opinion from another vendor's software. Microsoft Anti-Spyware beta
is fairly decent actually. Unfortunately the posts that we generally see are
often just from the people who've had problems with the application and many
of those seem to be user problems as opposed to actual problems with the
application or complaints of adverse effects from removing spyware. A second
opinion in this couldn't hurt.

I last ran a defragger (PerfectDisk) about a week ago.

As you said, it's intermitant, I'd not guess immediately that the problem
was file fragmentation. That'd not be something I'd think of that would be
causing this.

It is as if XP has a 'lock manager' component which is over-
sensitised and it kicks with full locking of task switching and other
explorer functions when it is not really necessary.

I don't know of any specific "feature" of XP that would cause this to
happen. It does make me want to ask if you have any of your processes
running with elevated priority status however. If, say, your virus scanner
ran with a "high" priority level it may cause this sort of bahavior. Could
you have modified one of your files to start with a higher priority than
normal?

I am not saying money is no object but what application are you think
of? Do you have a link and I will check out the cots.

I think that my favorite paid utility, that has this feature, would be
TuneUp Utilities which you can get a trial version of here:

http://www.tune-up.com/

Having suffered similar problems in the past and then used the utility to
run explorer in a separate process I've been able to clear it up to some
extent. There's a 30 day trial and if the software manages to clear your
problem you can pay for it or allow it to lapse I suppose. I doubt very much
that it would then delete the changes that it had made.

A couple of ideas might be to kill your prefetch files and let them be
rebuilt when the OS next loads. They're good to keep on hand as they allow
applications to load faster but once in a while they become bloated and
should be deleted as they may contain information no longer valid or needed.

You mentioned that you like to leave the Taskmanager sitting in the tray.
There's a neat tool (not too large a footprint here on my computers but
maybe a bit large for your current PC) called StatBar. I try to not give out
too many software links by name because there's so many choices and I don't
like to have someone come to me and say that such-and-such didn't work for
me. However, I've never suffered any ill effects from it, it's easy to use,
and it has some nice features. You can see it here if you'd like:
http://www.statbar.nl/

Galen
--

"My mind rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me
the most abstruse cryptogram or the most intricate analysis, and I am
in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense then with artificial
stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for
mental exaltation." -- Sherlock Holmes

 

[Michael W. Ryder]

This is a bit weird. Please read this slightly long posting as I
describe one weirdness at the end.

------

I am running XP Pro + SP1 and I find that what I believe is called
the "Explorer shell" seems to lock up every now and then. The lock
lasts for a couple of minutes.

I have run XP Pro for over a year but now there are these times which
seem to broadly co-incide with some applications demanding a lot of
cpu (my systen is not very powerful at 700 MHz) that I find I can not
select other apps from clicking their tabs on the taskbar or using
the ALT+TAB task switcher!

Even if I wait patiently for the task management routines in XP to
allocate a timeslice of resources to my new request, nothing really
seems to happen. And then finally the system suddenly frees itself
up and all the screen requests I made happen at once!

I had thought it might be the registry backing itself up because th
system has detected an abnormal situation but there is nothing in the
event log about these locks and I would have expected to see
any registry backups reported there.

Third party utilities, such as Powerpro, which seem to be loaded into
memory (and which normally don't seem to depend on Explorer being
free to show their menus when I bump one edge of the screen) do not
show themselves when I call for them. Pop up toolbar/menus on the
taskbar do not appear when I click on them. This is odd because this
sort of thing nealry always works no matter how bad my system is
behaving.

Also, if I try to close or to shrink Windows such as Win Explorer I
often (but not always) get no response at all. Nor can I even get
these windows to the front of the screen by clicking on them!

THE STRANGEST THING TO ME IS that if I get to a window such as my
Opera browser then I can work with it entirely normally. I can
browse the web and call up all sorts of Opera menus and functions
quite normally. But I can not get windows to open and close and to
come forward and so on as I have described.

Can anyone work out what is happening?

I had a similar problem with a disk drive cable going bad. Replacing
the cable totally cleared up the problem.

 

[Bill Woods]

On Wed 09 Mar 2005 02:47:41, Michael W. Ryder wrote:

I had a similar problem with a disk drive cable going bad.
Replacing the cable totally cleared up the problem.

Is there anywhere in XP which logs such hardware faults? Maybe I can
check to see if there have been attempted retries ona particular
disk.