cisco_kid_too said:
I have a new XP Pro installation. Worked fine for about 2 weeks. Now the
computer will lock every time I try to start a program. If I go to
TaskManager and end the task, I can start the program with no problem.
The screensaver will not click in, I'm assuming for the same reason.
Never seen anything like this. Any ideas?
Running with SP2 installed?
Any chance you installed some software a little before the problem showed up?
I needed something free to decode a single .rar compressed file. So I
looked around the net and found people seemed to be using ZipGenius
with XP. So I tried installing. And I asked it to do the minimum, not
to change any file associations, etc, not to load the taskbar, etc.
But immediately after installing I found clicking on icons to start
programs would seem to do nothing, sometimes clicking on a second
icon would bring up both of them, sometimes not.
I started up ShellExView, a free utility that shows some of the stuff
going on in the background. Sure enough ZipGenius was running to give
right-click features. One click with ShellExView and I disabled ZipGenius
right-click features. I could still manually invoke the program, just
not use a right click to get there. And the minute I disabled that the
icons started working again. So I torched ZipGenius off the system.
Perhaps you can cautiously explore some of the things with ShellExView.
Just looking doesn't do any damage that I know of. But you might find
some things lurking in the background, try turning them off, one at a
time, and see if the problem goes away. If not then turn them back on
and keep looking.
SP2 has resulted in thousands of people reporting problems and lockups.
There is almost never a trace to explain what happened.
