Performance and other oddities

[Guest]

I am using XP Professional SP2. I am having intermittant lockups where the
System task (in the Task Manager) goes up to 99+% for 10-20 seconds every
couple minutes or so. during this time everything stops moving. No updates
in the task manager (even on the system idle task), mouse pointer and
keyboard stopps responding. The rainbow on the mouse pointer gets stuck in
the middle, or the hourglass gets stuck on it's side if that particular
animation is playing. Presently things come back to normal for a couple
minutes, and then the lockup returns.

Another thing I have noticed recently is a file on my desktop that appears
and disappears periodically, apparently on it's own. It is called
GMerror.dat. It is a two byte file with a value of 21. I do not know if
there is anything else in the sector containing the file. I have done a
virus scan on that particular file, and come up blank. Another thing that is
odcd about this file is that it appears as a text document even though the
extension is '.dat'. I am unable to see any extension beyond the .dat. File
properties reporte that it is a Text file.

I have scanned with Adaware, and MS anti-spyware, as well as Norton
anti-virus all with the most recent definitions. Nothing is found by any of
them. The GMerror.dat file started showing up after I cleaned up my
registry. The lockups have been around for a long time, and persisted
through a motherboard replacement, and an operating system reload (though it
took about 6 months to come back after the reload). I don't want to have to
reload the operating system every 6 months.

Help!!

 

[old jon]

Just a guess in the dark. GM could be Graphics Manager.

 

[Guest]

Not real sure what Graphics Manager would be. I don't have a program that is
named that, and I don't recall a Windows service with that name either. The
thing that disturbs me is that it tends to disappear and reappear at random
intervals without me doing anything that I know of to make it happen.

 

[Guest]

It sounds like you have a rouge dialer program that creates a dat file when
it can't connect to the service it is trying to dial, can you open the file
in notepad when it does appear also run task manager and see if you get a
spike in usage when the file appears sometimes antivirus and spyware programs
wont see a dialer program unless you tell it to look for them.

 

[Guest]

I can open the file in Notepad, it contains the value 21. Properties reports
that the file is 2 bytes long. There could be something beyond that 2 bytes,
but I can't read it with the tools that I have. Its appearence or
disappearence does not correspond with usage spikes. I tried running
antivirus directly against GMerror.dat, but this did not detect a virus. Is
there a way to determine who or what program created a file? The hard disk
is in NTFS format.

 

[Guest]

Some more info on this problem.

I looked at Knowledgebase article Q295714 How to Break Down the System
Process, and downloaded the Support tools for XP. Thing is, when the problem
shows up, the performance monitor does not update, and I get gaps in the the
graph. Therefore I cannot determine which thread is the culprit. I am
guessing that it is the 0 thread because it's priority is 0 and if that
thread was running wild, it would prevent all other threads from running.