More Random XP Happenings

[TW]Fox

[TW]Fox

[TW]Fox

Man of Honour
Joined
17 Oct 2002
Posts
160,207
Hi guys,

Having trouble with one of my machines which I've rebuilt several times now.

Basically, once the problem starts happening, things will start refusing to run. Click IE, nothing. Try and bring up Task Manager, it just doesn't appear. Go to shut machine down, just sits there on 'Saving Settings'.

I've no idea what to do - I've reinstalled Windows a number of times now. It's usually fine at first but then after a few hours of being installed it all goes pete tong.

Spec:

DFI Lanparty Ultra-D
A64 3200+
2Gb Corsair XMS3200LL TwinX
160Gb Maxtor DiamondMax Plus9 8Mb
120Gb Maxtor DiamondMax Plus9 2Mb
ATi Radeon X850XT
Enermax Liberty 400W PSU

I'm using onboard sound, SP2, and all the latest drivers.

I've already tried swapping out the memory, to no avail, and the 160Gb HDD was new in last night (took it out of my main machine) see if it was an HDD issue....
 
Are you installing any software in the few hours in which things start to go wrong?

Is the behavior replicated in safe mode?
 
[TW]Fox said:
Not OC'ing, no. As for software, no, nothing bar Office 2003 and AVG Free Edition..
Click to expand...

Next time don't install anything and see what happens...

My safe mode question is relevant as that would point to a driver issue.
 
marc2003 said:
it could be a windows update causing you grief. (assuming you've installed them all?)
Click to expand...

Could be but you wouldn't think so on a clean system. I'd say it's more likely hardware/drivers.
 
As a note, a few Windows Updates screwed up my PC during my last XP build.

They crippled my sound card and made Windows very very slow, it also kept moaning about unallocated DLLs after every reboot.

I tracked down some help through the Microsoft support pages and lots of Google results on my error messages and symptoms and uninstalled a number of suspect updates and everything was perfect again. Sometimes the updates can interfere with the PC's software and drivers.
 
Update.

This problem is also affecting my Media Box. Symptoms are exactly the same - after being on for 5 minutes or so it either becomes very slow or just plain refuses to run up many applications.

I did manage to get into Task Manager once, though, and noticed an instance of SVCHOST.EXE was using 99% CPU.

Specs of this machine:

Shuttle SN45G2 NForce2
XP3200+
512Mb Corsair XMS2700
40Gb HDD
GeForce4 Ti4200

Seems very odd that two machines are affected by the same problem.

Any further suggestions? AVG shows no viruses found.. Ran Spybot S&D and it stopped 15% of the way in with 'Scan Aborted by User'. We didnt click abort..
 
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^Interesting. I setup an old PC for my dad over the weekend (latest updates etc) and had the exact same problem, svchost was hogging all the cputime when doing a windows update and it wouldn't let me reduce the priority.
 
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