I think I am pretty clever with my pcs and I think I have had almost every stupid thing you can have with making windows disfunctional, but this one has me stumped

Lately on my laptop, I am having the main explorer functions (desktop, start menu, status bar etc) just freeze.
As far as the rest of the system is concerned, everything is fine (cpu, performance etc.) except i cannot use anything like the start menu or status bar, but everything else continues to work.

The trigger is always either
- right clicking on desktop icons
- right clicking on an entry in start menu
- (happened for the first time now) selecting and pressing delete over 2 shortcuts on the desktop
but only after the machine has been running quite a while

Now the basic task monitor shows nothing hung up, no undue cpu or memory usage, and all clear.... I cannot use explorer or file managers which were open at the point the trigger happened, but new file managers would work fine... I cannot kill explorer or file managers either.

In the end I cannot properly shut down windows, so I have to do a hard restart.

Looking in the windows task manager everything seems pretty normal except there are a lot of page faults in some places which means a lot of swapping - I suspect it happens when I havent used these parts of the interface for a while and things have been swapped to disk. And they dont come back fast enough... But thats just a wild guess

But how do I figure this out - I am going to dust up wintasks pro see if it helps see something I cant see right now, but what other tools can i use to help me puzzle this out - any better analysis tools? any of the "process juggling" tools (like process tamer) would help? if it turns out to be swapping the problem, is there anything that can be done to protect some things from being swapped out?

Tired of restarting my machine the hard way ;)

I'm trying to find a pragmatic solution to the following task:

Find new pages/sites/posts around a set of topics in as automated a way as possible, in an ongoing way.
By new I mean either is newly arrived/posted, or not seen before because too "deep" in the "dark" web so we havent gotten to the 21000th page on google where they are...

So in a way it would be a tool that
- is able to trawl a bunch of directories, blogs, feeds
- is also able to run a whole list of searches in google/yahoo/ask etc. or some aggregator sites, possibly starting at page 100 to avoid all the noisy stuff at the top
- gather all URLs referred in this
- then it should be able to discard any site/url previously seen aka 'greylist') so as to produce a list of new things to review
- update the greylist

In a way this combines features from a search tool, and update watcher tool, a web ferret, and URL catcher etc.

If I had to write it I would probably write a perl application with a topic manager, a web crawler, possibly even plug in a bayesian toy to help ignore spammy sites, a results list with preview... But I dont have time, and I am not sure this is something I can just commission and hope to get something workable (= better than using manual methods) at a reasonable cost.

So it got me thinking about how some of the benefits of this tool might be achieved by combining existing tools, say by plugging website watcher with search engine results URLs with the different search terms hard coded in each. Now this doesn't quite work, as WSW would highlight too many other changes in content rather than purely new stuff, but there just might be ways...

So it's not really a coding snack, it's more of a software jigsaw puzzle.

As I am on a contract I am stuck in hotels at night, and once thing that occurred to me is that it would be nice to watch DVDs on my laptop to escape from the boredom of TV

I then realised that the standard software installed on said laptop did not include any DVD codec layer.

I tried to find free codecs/players but the results were unsuccessful - couldnt figure out how to actually make the DVD menus work on any of them.

Right not i downloaded a demo and that works, but I am curious as to what people are using since these players are not cheap!

On my other PCs I had something that came with the dvd drive, called cyberlink but for some reason this wasnt sent or installed with this laptop... I am not sure what the licensing would say to my installing those on this laptop or if it is any good.

From what I can see I have 4 options:
* continue to fight with free options until i find one that actually works through the menus to the films
* buy a standalone DVD media player program
* buy a plug in for windows media
* use clonedvd to make files from my DVDs I can watch in a normal player - seems like hard work though just to watch a film

which brings me to the question, what do people use?