Rotating hourglass

[Guest]

My computer is constantly displaying the cursor with rotating hourglass.

I can use it, but have to be quick when clicking on anything, such as in the
start menu, as they disappear after a couple of seconds. I ran AdAware &
Spybot and removed all that the found - AdAware was just MRU & tracking
cookies. The hourglass went away for a while until the computer was
restarted, and the hourglass is back.

XP Home, SP2 & all updates installed.

Antivirus is up to date and no viruses detected.

I've run AdAware and Spybot since, with no result.

I've also removed restore points and restarted System Restore.

Can anyone help?

Thanks

Jackie

 

[Mark F.]

My computer is constantly displaying the cursor with rotating hourglass.

I can use it, but have to be quick when clicking on anything, such as in the
start menu, as they disappear after a couple of seconds. I ran AdAware &
Spybot and removed all that the found - AdAware was just MRU & tracking
cookies. The hourglass went away for a while until the computer was
restarted, and the hourglass is back.

That's called the "wait cursor". The hourglass alone is the "busy"
cursor. The one with the cursor and hourglass is the "working in
background" cursor and generally means that the application's worker
thread is running in the background (e.g., MS Outlook downloading
messages).

Sounds like there is a stuck process that is either trying to initialize
or is unable to terminate for some reason. To find out what applications
are running press CTRL+ALT+DEL keys and click on "Tasks" button. This
dialog's "Processes" tab will show you what is running in the
background. There are also two utilities for this purpose here:

http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/Filemon.html
http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/ProcessExplorer.html

Be sure to download the version for WinXP.

HTH
Mark