System hanging

[Frank D. Nicodem, Jr.]

I'm experiencing something on my Windows XP system that I've never
encountered before. I'll be working along just fine, and all of a sudden
the whole system will "lock up". The mouse cursor can be moved, as usual;
but I can't click on anything. I can't change window focus (using Alt-Tab
or any other means). And while I can bring up the Task Manager window using
Ctrl-Alt-Del, I can't do anything with it. I can't click in it, to try and
kill a process; I can't even close the window once it's open.

I can't use the Windows key to bring up the menus; I can't get to the Start
menu. Nothing seems to work. It's "frozen". The only thing I've found to
do so far is to completely power the system down, and reboot from scratch.

So far, I haven't found any specific activity that is causing this. One
time I was working in Excel, and when I tried to ask for "Help" on
something, as soon as the Help window opened, the system froze. Another
time, I decided to see if I could do a System Restore (to get rid of the
problem, since it's only started happening in the last 24 hours). I went
through the whole process of selecting a restore point, etc. But when it
began to shut down the system to do a reboot... it "froze", and I had to
power down.

What would cause all input to just lock up like that? And when it does,
what recourse do I have? I haven't installed any new software recently; I
haven't made any system-level changes. I can think of nothing that would
have caused this to start happening.

Any ideas????

 

[Frank D. Nicodem, Jr.]

Some additional observations to add to the original posting...

I thought I might try a System Restore, in case something had gotten messed
up in the Registry. I went through the process, selecting a Checkpoint from
yesterday (before the problem started). The process got to the point where
System Restore was about to reboot the system... and it froze. I had to
power down, and when I rebooted, the System Restore could not complete. I
did manage to get a System Restore done, but only by booting into Safe Mode,
and doing it from there. Then it succeeded.

A second observation, similar to this one. I just uninstalled a small
application, and the uninstall process wanted me to reboot. I said OK, and
it started shutting everything down. But part way into the process of
shutting down... it froze up again. Nothing responding, and I had to power
down, and manually reboot.

Don't know if that adds anything, or helps debug the problem. But it
appears that I can't do a Restart unless I'm in Safe Mode.

 

[Roger]

Some additional observations to add to the original posting...

I thought I might try a System Restore, in case something had gotten
messed up in the Registry. I went through the process, selecting a
Checkpoint from yesterday (before the problem started). The process got
to the point where System Restore was about to reboot the system... and
it froze. I had to power down, and when I rebooted, the System Restore
could not complete. I did manage to get a System Restore done, but only
by booting into Safe Mode,

[snip]

This may seem basic but have to got all MS updates. Have you done a up
todate Virus scan, I hope you haven't got Norton, which can cause a lot of
problems-conflicts. Have you done a scan with Adaware SE or Spybot search &
destroy etc.
You could consider posting in windowsxp.Hardware !
"Roger"
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