Thrashing on Paging File

[lee]

OK. I have a serious problem and I can not figure it out. Occasionally,
(most often when browsing pages in Internet Explorer) my system starts
thrashing the disk drive for 3-4 minutes and my system becomes
unusable.

Looking at Task Manager shows MILLIONS of read/writes to the disk
drive.

I installed some i/o monitoring tool and it shows these read/writes
occuring to:

C:\Drive Information\wkNtFsLdf.dat

I assume this is the paging file.

I am running XP Professional/SP2.

I am using a Dell Inspiron 5160 with 1 gig of memory. My hard drive has
about 30 gig of free space on it. After the problem started happening,
I installed a memory monitor (it just monitors the usage - not a memory
MANAGER). When the problem occurs, I can watch my free virtual memory
go from the normal level of about 750mb slowly drop to ZERO while my
system thrashes. Once it goes all the way down, the system "frees up"
and the memory usage returns to the 700-750 mb free range. This usually
takes several minutes.

As the memory usage goes up, I have run task manager to see if any
programs are "hogging" memory. Nothing unusual shows up even though my
memory monitor shows excessive usage. Task manager does show several
MILLION read/writes for Internet Explorer.

Here is what I have done (this is the short list):

Ran scandisk to see if hard drive is OK.
Ran defrag on the hard drive.
Run Spybot SEVERAL times - nothing found.
Turned off indexing service.
Have tried NUMEROUS virtual memory configurations (now back to using
the XP defaults)
Ran Hijackthis to see if any "odd" programs are running - none were
Removed all software from my system that I did not recognize.
Searched every database/forum/faq that I could find to see if anyone
else has the problem.

None of these solutions changed anything.

As I stated above, most often this problem occurs when I am running
Internet Explorer but, it has also occured on several other programs
such as Quicken, Visual FoxPro, Word, Excel, etc.

Sometimes it occurs when I have just a single task running - other
times when I have multiple. When the system is running OK, I am able to
have MANY windows active on my machine with no memory or performance
problems.

I would be more than happy to provide TONS of additional information if
someone thinks they have an idea of what is happening. My next step is
to throw this machine in the trash and try a new one but, I know it's
software related - not the machine.

Any ideas?

 

[Guest]

Youre memory checker is using memory at the same time youre checking
it for memory overruns....If youre hd makes unusual noises then why chk
the memory,maybe chk the hd for problems.All hd mfg make a DOS utility
that checks the hd.How old is the hd and/or computer,hds last only 3 yrs or
so....

 

[Gerry Cornell]

wkNtFsLdf.dat is not the pagefile, which is pagefile.sys.

What are your anti-spyware arrangements?

Google shows quite a number of reports in Chinese and few in
English. One report was that the file was growing to 41 gb! The two
persons involved decided just to delete it in safemode.

You could try renaming the file in safe mode to wkNtFsLdf.old and
observe the affect for a couple of days before deleting the file.


--

Hope this helps.

Gerry
~~~~
FCA
Stourport, England

Enquire, plan and execute
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