Pauses - why?

[Gary D.]

I have XP Home, P4, 3.0GHz, 1GB RAM (640MB free on average).

I have a number of keyboard shortcuts, e.g. CTRL+ALT+N launches Notepad.

Sometimes when I use my keyboard shortcuts, XP temporarily freezes (for
anything up to 45 seconds) before the shortcut activates and the associated
application/item launches.

It doesn't matter which keyboard shortcut I use and I cannot identify anything
specific that is causing this behaviour. All utilities that I have used to
check the shortcut definitions have confirmed that all if okay.

This is not a keyboard problem, i.e. loose connections, as the shortcuts do
work after the pause, so clearly the physical wire connections are fine.

I cannot locate the cause of this.

Any ideas?

 

[de Graff]

Do you have any other computers at home that you have accessed from the
computer in question? I have repeatedly warned my coworker at the office
about dragging shortcuts from one machine to another. Here's what may be
happening...

You drag a shortcut from machine A to machine B. If you have the program
installed in the same place on both computers and look at the properties you
see that the shortcuts are the same, right?

Wrong. The machine name is actually encoded into the shortcut but not shown
in the properties. If you try to run the shortcut on machine B while machine
A is on the network then the shortcut gets resolved quickly. However, if
machine A is not on the network then you have to wait until machine B times
out looking for machine A before you can continue. The puzzling part to most
users is that the cpu load while waiting is effectively 0 so it seems like
Windows has frozen.

So my advice is to check the particular keyboard shortcut that is causing
the problem. If necessary, delete it and recreate it.

 

[Gary D.]

Do you have any other computers at home that you have accessed from the
computer in question? I have repeatedly warned my coworker at the office
about dragging shortcuts from one machine to another. Here's what may be
happening...

You drag a shortcut from machine A to machine B. If you have the program
installed in the same place on both computers and look at the properties you
see that the shortcuts are the same, right?

Wrong. The machine name is actually encoded into the shortcut but not shown
in the properties. If you try to run the shortcut on machine B while machine
A is on the network then the shortcut gets resolved quickly. However, if
machine A is not on the network then you have to wait until machine B times
out looking for machine A before you can continue. The puzzling part to most
users is that the cpu load while waiting is effectively 0 so it seems like
Windows has frozen.

So my advice is to check the particular keyboard shortcut that is causing
the problem. If necessary, delete it and recreate it.

Thanks for the reply.

I'm sure that's not the problem.

I created the shortcuts on the XP machine from scratch, using the correct
target paths,etc. for the new machine.