Vista partially freezing

Hello,

I noticed some threads about Vista freezing, but looks like it's not
exactly what I have. Every now and then, my Vista freezes partially. It
did that about 40 minutes ago and it's in that state at the moment. I
was starting Notepad from Quick Launch (its icon is still "pushed down")
and doing something as ordinary when everything between the Start button
(bottom left on my screen) from system clock/date (bottom right on my
screen) froze. This includes Quick Launch, the application windows and
tray as well. Also, my MSN crashed and my Firefox wasn't able to connect
to any site (though other browsers worked well). In addition to that
most programs don't seem to start, most programs won't shut down if
closed and task manager freezes too if it's used to kill a process (no,
the process doesn't die either).

However, I succesfully closed this browser before and started it again
during the freeze, so it doesn't affect everything. (This is old Mozilla
Firebird in case someone's interested.) And yes, the desktop works, I
started this browser from a shortcut on it.

Sometimes I've seen that Vista system administrator verification thing
appearing (about something else, like it was stuck before) after I
choose to shut down the computer (computer shutting after the dialog is
closed), sometimes it shuts with time and sometimes I need to manually
press the power switch.

I've seen speculations about it being some leaking utility in Vista or
possibly antivirus software or firewall. I'm running AntiVir and
ZoneAlarm at the moment. (I experienced even more severe freezes while
using Avast! a year ago. Those ended after I uninstalled it.) Anyway,
after seeing that administration verification thing popping up when
shutting down sometimes, I'm thinking it could maybe be partially on,
but bugging. Anything to try that possibility?

I'd use ProcessExplorer for more information, but the explorer window I
try to start it from just freezes and it doesn't start.

And in case you wonder if long uptime could cause this - I switched the
computer on approximately 12 hours ago. The longest uptime I've had with
pretty much same set-up of programs is something like 35 days, so this
freeze seems to be quite random.

Normally, the computer works normally after booting. Let's see what
happens this time.


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Xurs
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When I chose to shut down the computer from the Start Menu, I had two or
three Task Managers hanging, and couldn't kill them with Process
Explorer. Basically everything else seemed to work OK.

After I pressed the button, it started to log out normally. However, at
a late phase of it, the bottom bar turned into what it was during the
freeze. It showed exactly same things on it, the programs, the tray,
even the notepad icon was "pressed down". I think that normally the
whole bar just disappears during log out, right? It didn't show anything
else, but when I pressed Enter after waiting a while, a hanging Task
Manager window appeared. When trying to close it (by pressing X on the
corner), a window appeared. Its title was "Microsoft Windows" and it
told me the program hangs, but could respond if I wait and gave me two
choices, to exit it or to cancel. Exitting did nothing, the window just
remained there without even blinking. Then I tried the Ctrl-Alt-Del
combination and tried opening new Task Manager. However, it only
returned to same; that Task Bar ghost and hanging Task Manager window.
Pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del again did nothing. Additionally, after waiting a
while, the screen went black for few seconds. That is also something
I've seen before.

After waiting a bit more it started to look certain it's not going to
shut down on its own. I used the power button to shut it down and
restart it. During startup it gave the dialog about non-clean shutdown
and options to start in normal or safe mode. I chose normal and it
started OK, with no problems. I used some programs for a while and went
to bed. Today it started OK again, no problems whatsoever.

So, killing explorer.exe (if it can be done) seems to unfreeze at least
many parts of it. However, why does the hanging Task Manager window
stay? Problems with killing processes can cause it?

Because I've faced odd problems before with unkillable processes. In
that situation, the process is listed in Task Manager but it just won't
die. Not by Process Explorer or this other tool I tried, Process Killer.
The process just stays there despite how many times you've tried to kill
it. It's happened with three programs, all of which are run without
special privileges.
- Utopia Angel, a game utility did this once, and it wasn't possible
to run it with the ghost process.
- Mozilla Firebird, the older version of Firefox mysteriously crashed
and Vista didn't handle the crash correctly causing mysterious results
and the process being unkillable. Happened maybe twice.
- Half-Life, a game launcer crashes often due some bugs related to
Microsoft Virtual C/C++ library. Quite often several instances of it
stay in the processes.

None of these die until the computer is restarted. The computer
restarts normally when these processes are unkillable.

And in case you want specs, I have 32 bit Windows Vista Home Premium on
AMD Athlon 64 X2 4000+ and 2 GB of memory.


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Xurs
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