Machine becomes unresponsive

HP Pavillion DV7 Notebook PC
Intel Core 2 Quad CPU Q9000 at 2GHz (64-bit)
6.00 GB RAM
64-bit Vista Home Premium SP1

I am a computer application programmer and have a lot of experience with XP, but mostly as a user. This is my first Vista machine and I have little experience with Vista, but I can find my way around it...eventually. (I'm used to finding configuration options in XP and have to search a little to find the equivalent option in Vista.)

Quite frequently, when I am using my machine, it goes into an "unresponsive" or "thrashing" state. By this I mean the hard drive light goes on continuously, and some or all all running applications become unresponsive (they don't respond to clicks and keypresses, eventually showing "Not Responding" in the title bar). Usually Explorer and the task bar and start menu remain functional but sometimes I get the spinning ring of death. Control-Alt-Delete causes the screen to go black for a few minutes before the prompt comes up.

Sometimes this happens with the Task Manager open. Sometimes Task Manager becomes unresponsive too, but when it doesn't it appears to show only 30% processor usage, and only about 2Gb of RAM are in use.

The most frequent program I use when not programming is Windows Live Mail, and the problem seems to crop up when I'm reading and browsing e-mails, and Windows Live Mail seems to be the first to exhibit the problems, but that's probably coincidence.

No error messages. Is there a system log that I should be looking at?

Sometimes in Task Manager I've seen WERfault.exe running - does this mean a background process is crashing? How can I get more info on that?

The problem started soon after I got the machine. The first time it cropped up, I turned off SuperFetch and the problem seemed to disappear for a few days, but after a windows update, the problem returned just as bad as before.

The machine never totally hangs -- if I wait around for a few minutes, eventually it finishes whatever was tying it up and all applications become responsive again. But this occurs quite frequently, 5-10 times per hour, and thus it is very hard to get work done.

I

hi and welcome to vista forums

there is a seen problem with svchost.exe spiking causing high cpu spikes and hangs. You might want to watch next time it happens and if nec kill the offending process. there is a fix on the interweb, just nodt remember what it is.

Check it out

Well, this would disable it:

• Click Start button – Control Panel
• Select Administrative Tools
• Double clicks Service shortcut in the right pane
• Then disable windows error reporting service
• Restart to take this effect

But... you still have to wonder what errors it's reporting?

lemur said:

Well, this would disable it:

• Click Start button – Control Panel
• Select Administrative Tools
• Double clicks Service shortcut in the right pane
• Then disable windows error reporting service
• Restart to take this effect

But... you still have to wonder what errors it's reporting?

Click to expand...

Disregard this... we have to figure out what is causing the problem and not just mask it.

Collecting User-Mode Dumps (Windows)

zigzag3143 said:

I

hi and welcome to vista forums

there is a seen problem with svchost.exe spiking causing high cpu spikes and hangs. You might want to watch next time it happens and if nec kill the offending process. there is a fix on the interweb, just nodt remember what it is.

Check it out

Click to expand...

zigzag,

I stated in my post that the CPU use is still reasonable when this happens, and there are no svchost.exe processes with high usage in task manager.

lemur said:

we have to figure out what is causing the problem and not just mask it.

Collecting User-Mode Dumps (Windows)

Click to expand...

Should I get full dumps or minidumps?

Inadvertently said:

zigzag3143 said:

I

hi and welcome to vista forums

there is a seen problem with svchost.exe spiking causing high cpu spikes and hangs. You might want to watch next time it happens and if nec kill the offending process. there is a fix on the interweb, just nodt remember what it is.

Check it out

Click to expand...

zigzag,

I stated in my post that the CPU use is still reasonable when this happens, and there are no svchost.exe processes with high usage in task manager.

Click to expand...

Yep saw it the first time. if cpu and ram are "reasonable" whats causing the freeze. the spinning circle of death is the "busy" icon. If you are busy the computer is telling to wait so it can catch up.

Inadvertently said:

lemur said:

we have to figure out what is causing the problem and not just mask it.

Collecting User-Mode Dumps (Windows)

Click to expand...

Should I get full dumps or minidumps?

Click to expand...

Gimme what ya got. Ken, we can analyze these and figure what going on - hopefully...

Another symptom I forgot to mention before. Sometimes when I press ctrl-alt-delete to get the task manager, I get "Login process has failed to create the security options dialog" / "Failure - Security Options"

Googling this I find accusations against various antivirus programs, disk drivers, power supply, system file corruption, hard failure (need a SMART utility), a corrupted sidebar (I'm not using one), Java, the conficker worm, readyboost, overheating

Running

sfc /scannow

yields

"Windows resource protection could not start the repair service"

yet both the Windows Installer service and Windows Module Installer service are started.

Holding down F8 does not put the computer into safe mode. I had to use msconfig to set safe mode and then restart. In safe mode sfc /scannow works.

lemur said:

Inadvertently said:

lemur said:

we have to figure out what is causing the problem and not just mask it.

Collecting User-Mode Dumps (Windows)

Click to expand...

Should I get full dumps or minidumps?

Click to expand...

Gimme what ya got. Ken, we can analyze these and figure what going on - hopefully...

Click to expand...

Lemur

The link just drops on an MS page on how to collect dumps

After booting into safe mode, we were able to run sfc /scannow. It reported some corruption and said it was able to repair some files but not others, and to check c:\windows\logs\cbs\cbs.log for more information. I looked at this file butI don't understand it. The key line wseems to say something about "cannot repair" "settings.ini" and "microsoft-windows-sidebar". Is it worth posting the file?

Here's the cbs.log file.

Inadvertently said:

Here's the cbs.log file.

Click to expand...

I

Guess what

2009-10-14 10:02:53, Info CSI 00000319 [SR] Verify and Repair Transaction completed. All files and registry keys listed in this transaction have been successfully repaired
2009-10-14 10:12:47, Info CBS Scavenge: Package store indicates there is no component to scavenge, skipping.

Yes, I saw that, but there are other transactions that did *not* have all files successfully repaired. Also the output of sfc at the command prompt said that some files were repaired and some were not.

In particular the 10:12 transaction said all was okay, but the 10:02 transaction said there were problems.

Inadvertently said:

Yes, I saw that, but there are other transactions that did *not* have all files successfully repaired. Also the output of sfc at the command prompt said that some files were repaired and some were not.

Click to expand...

The most interesting thing I saw was the tons of duplicate ownerships. Did you have a problme with ownership?

I have no idea what that means. The only symptoms I was seeing were what I described. What would be the impact of ownership problems?

Inadvertently said:

I have no idea what that means. The only symptoms I was seeing were what I described. What would be the impact of ownership problems?

Click to expand...

Multiple permissions may slow down the computer in those folders. I dont think thats the cause of you unresponsiveness.

When your machine becomes unresponsive (actually just before) can you run task manager to see what app/process is using cpu cycles, and ram. when you find it can you right click the app/process and "create dump file" watch where it is going to be put, zip it and upload it to us.


Ken

Hi,

I have a dump file. It is 1.6 gig. I zipped it and uploaded it to:

http://www.savvysoft.com/wlmail (2)_zip.zip

What's causing the hang?

Inadvertently said:

Hi,

I have a dump file. It is 1.6 gig. I zipped it and uploaded it to:

http://www.savvysoft.com/wlmail%20(2)_zip.zip

What's causing the hang?

Click to expand...

IS that just one dump file or all of them?