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advice needed: weird lockup/freeze (process/dll/disk/cache?? issue in explorer)

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iphigenie:
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 ;)

f0dder:
Page faults doesn't necessarily mean swapping/paging, they can happen for other reasons as well (like accessing memory-mapped files).

Do you have any custom shell extensions installed? That'd be my first hunch, considering your symptoms. Can be pretty hard to track down problems with those critters, too.

iphigenie:
Using process monitor to creat a log, but boy is there a lot of stuff in there, and lots of errors, and I am not sure which are "normal" and which are worrying

I am at the moment suspecting the following:
* either of the qt bars
* stardocks' resident dll

I'll remove them and see. I have no issues with these on the other machines, but they are the things I can think of having possibly changed in January prior to the problem starting to happen...

Whenever the lock happens open applications remain responsive (cpu low) but there is typically a lot of disk activity which has nothing to do with applications as far as I can tell (thats why i suspected swapping might have something to do with it)

I'm going to run processmonitor on my other machine which has at least some of the same software and no problems, and see if I spot any differences. It's amazing how much stuff goes on in there - constant scoping through the registry, for one...

iphigenie:
This is still happening but less

I have uninstalled both stardock's windows blind and the qt add ons (i wondered about the qt add ons because i installed them recently and the history mentions quite a few "right click" related fixes so it was at least possible)

As I type this I have a fully responsive windows xp, including task bar etc. EXCEPT that I have an open folder windows which is frozen, as I made the mistake to right click on a file to delete it. There was a bunch of disk activity but no context menu appeared.

I won't be able to open another file manager window now, but all applications still work, i can go on and start something else, or finish my work. I also i can still open total commander - until i right click on something in there and it locks up as well - and in most cases any application where i do something that would open a file open/save dialog will also be locked up.

It has to either be disk related or an explorer add on

I'm leaving process log running in hope i can spot something, but that logs sooo much how could i ever spot anything.

using hijack this or other analysers I just dont see anything in what is configured, and if l look at processes I see nothing that rings alarm bells.

Any idea how I can trace this, what to look/filter for in process log, for example?

iphigenie:
what makes this annoying is that the frozen apps/windows just cannot be killed with anything i have tried

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