Windows XP SP2 Freezes Using Internet

[Fay Kalyus]

Since I installed Windows XP SP2 I've been plagued with a problem:
once in a while my computer locks up completely while it's talking to
the net. The mouse is frozen. Ctrl-Alt-Del doesn't work. Powering down
the cable modem doesn't help. I have to physically power down my
computer.

I've seen the problem occur during FTP and HTTP (Internet Explorer,
Mozilla, FTP-Commander, the DOS FTP program), though oddly enough I've
never seen it happen while using an online game or a voice chat system
such as PalTalk, which in some months accounts for 90% of my net time.

I'm running the firewall that was introduced in SP2. I have all the
latest Windows patches installed. My Norton Antivirus is up to date and
says everything is fine. Ad-Aware 6.0 found nothing.

My tray includes SocketWatch, a clock-setting program that does consult
the net, but which has worked fine since I installed it years ago. And in
any
case the problem only occurs while a net transaction is underway, so
SocketWatch is clearly off the hook. There are no other net-related items
in my tray.

Has anybody else experienced this problem, or can anybody suggest a
solution?

- Timothy Campbell
www.tc123.com

 

[Guest]

Fay,
Have you tried the Microsoft website? There are links there under SP2
that addrress that issue. I'm sorry I can't provide the link here but it is
not hard to find.
Best of luck. Ron

 

[Fay Kalyus]

Well, Ron, I just spent the last 30 minutes searching the Knowledge Base,
using every combination of description I can (while including Windows XP
SP2) ... and it's getting me nowhere. Just ONE element of the description
has numerous variations: power off, power down, power button, turn off,
switch off, shut down, shutdown, cold start, restart, hard boot, hard reboot
.... and so on.

The number of possible search phrases is enormous, and the Knowledge Base
doesn't seem to be very good at eliminating candidates.

Do you, in fact, recognize the symptoms I described, or is your advice just
a variation on RTFM?

- Timothy Campbell
www.tc123.com

P.S. I'll keep looking, but I'm not optimistic.

 

[Guest]

Since I have never used the site you mentioned and as far as I know none of
the people who own the stations I work on use it and I am not into games,
so no I can't say that I personally recognize your exact problem. However,
what fixes a frezze in one area will fix many others

 

[Gary R.]

The number of possible search phrases is enormous, and the Knowledge Base
doesn't seem to be very good at eliminating candidates.

Do you, in fact, recognize the symptoms I described, or is your advice
just a variation on RTFM?

The list of possible causes is also enormous, including hardware problems.
Way too many for someone to post a step-by-step. If your drivers are all
current, you can eliminate programs running at startup to see if they're
causing it. You can swap out hardware, including memory, cards, etc. To
show how elusive this can be, I just replaced a motherboard in order to be
able to use Windows update on a clean install; I installed several times,
with virtually all hardware swapped out piece by piece...memory, cards, CPU,
network, video, and still it would lock up at Windows update and a few
multimedia situations. It was, in fact, the motherboard....who'd a thought.

Do you have a wireless utility running? Many wireless networking components
will have you install their utility programs, and they conflict or are
totally unnecessary with SP2; for most of them you uninstall the utilities
and simply point Windows to the driver file. Many of the utility programs
can cause horrible problems, even if they worked fine before SP2.

If you have a spare hard drive, slip it in the machine in place of the
current one, and install and update XP. If it runs OK, at least you know
it's not hardware.

Gary

 

[Fay Kalyus]

Thanks for the reply, Gary.

No, I'm not running a wireless utility. My net situation is simply a cable
modem. And unfortunately I do not have a spare hard drive to install an
alternative or duplicated operating system. I really don't have any fancy
hardware on my machine. It's a relatively new 2.5 GHz Dell, to which I've
never added a single piece of internal hardware.

The problem started becoming awkward immediately after I installed SP2.
Mind you, prior to (and after) the installation of SP2, FTP-Commander used
to cause the same problem when I tried to disconnect from an FTP connection.
Not always, but most of the time.

This strongly suggests to me that the problem has nothing to do with
hardware. After all, an FTP disconnect is just a command. I have the
impression that some tiny section of Windows code is sitting in a tight
loop, waiting for something to happen -- and it never does. Incidentally,
FTP-Commander (and other programs) did NOT behave this way when my machine
was new, so I suspect the problem was introduced by a Microsoft security
patch.

Lest it should seem I'm ragging on FTP-Commander, I should mention that a
related problem occurs with DOS FTP. Several times a day I backup my work
files off-site by zipping them up and running an FTP script from a batch
file in a DOS window. Every once in a while -- and this predated SP2 -- the
DOS box would freeze up after the FTP tried to logout. This wouldn't lock
up the machine, though -- that part is a recent phenomenon. Yet once again
it appears that something was waiting for something to happen (perhaps some
kind of acknowledgement from the host).

The preponderance of evidence suggests that the problem is software -- not
hardware. I'd guess that somewhere in Windows there's a frustrated little
loop of code that never lets the operating system get a word (well, byte) in
edgewise. I'm not sure how I'd test this theory, or locate that frenzied
fragment of code so I can tell Microsoft what's wrong, though I think I
could probably cause it to happen "on command" simply by running
FTP-Commander.

Is there some kind of utility that can display what processes have become
active during, say, that last 50 milliseconds? (Bear in mind that it must
be on-screen, because once the machine locks up, it's all over.)

Or do you have any other suggestions based on the foregoing?

Thanks.

- Timothy Campbell
www.tc123.com

 

[David Candy]

hang is the search word you want.

If you have a normal keyboard you can force a crash and thus error logs

Ctrl (RHS only) + Scroll Lock twice Initiates a blue screen. Used for hangs to get a memory dump. Only works on PS/2 or older keyboards. USB keyboard users need to get an addin crash card.
Note: Keyboards have low priority so if another piece of hardware has caused the hang windows may not see this key sequence.
A registry key needs to be set to enable this key sequence.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\
SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\i8042prt\Parameters
CrashOnCtrlScroll=1 as a DWord.


Then you may be able to submit it here

http://oca.microsoft.com or more realisticly (as yopu caused the crash they might ignore it) via Technical Support (look in your phone book).

 

[David Candy]

Just type hang in help and it will find 41 KB articles.

 

[Fay Kalyus]

Wow, I've never heard of making the machine hang in this manner!

It sounds like the beginning of a long and perilous journey. I'm not
talking about the crash, but about trying to get technical support from
Microsoft without ponying up hundreds of dollars. I think it'd be easier to
stroll into deepest Mordor.

- Timothy Campbell
www.tc123.com

"David Candy" <.> wrote in message
hang is the search word you want.

If you have a normal keyboard you can force a crash and thus error logs

Ctrl (RHS only) + Scroll Lock twice Initiates a blue screen. Used for
hangs to get a memory dump. Only works on PS/2 or older keyboards. USB
keyboard users need to get an addin crash card.
Note: Keyboards have low priority so if another piece of hardware has
caused the hang windows may not see this key sequence.
A registry key needs to be set to enable this key sequence.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\
SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\i8042prt\Parameters
CrashOnCtrlScroll=1 as a DWord.


Then you may be able to submit it here

http://oca.microsoft.com or more realisticly (as yopu caused the crash they
might ignore it) via Technical Support (look in your phone book).

 

[Yves Leclerc]

You can try to fix the TCP/IP protocol with "Winsockxpfix.exe". You may
have gotten a spyware that "hacked" the TCP stack.