very weird problem in windows xp - cant click/load anything!

I have this very weird issue on windows xp. Even after I formatted, and reinstalled everything, it eventually comes back.

Now this doesnt always happen. My current guess is when i use around 2GB/4GB of my memory and have alot of apps running, it starts.

The problem is, sometimes for a period of time (could be up to a few hours), the following happen in any combination (sometimes all):
- I cant open a folder, if i double click, it just doesnt load.
- If any folders including My computer does open, all the contents inside are not displayed.
- Applications dont load. When I tried to load media player classic it said something like not enough memory when there is clearly 1GB free
- The right click button doesnt do anything, whether u click it on desktop, mozila or taskbar
- When I attempt to open folders, something else opens, like VLC media player, short cut creator.
- file menu etc does no open.

this is a very weird and annoying problem. has anyone had it before? It often also happens as im going through directories cuttin,pasting, renaming stuff...sometimes the folder wont open or just opens but doesnt show any contents in it. Has anyone faced a similar problem?

 

Hi and welcome to the WindowsBBS community,

How do you know? Where do you check it?

It sounds to me like "overloaded" memory or some wild program running in the background. Have you checked the CPU usage in Task Manager? Check the pagefile or virtual memory usage. If you have say, 4GB of RAM and you run that out, Windows will start putting things into pagefile, but still keep some physical memory free (for new data).

Also watch that if the HDD LED is running hard.

It sounds like it does not happen after a cold boot, but after you have loaded programs and are running applications.

Try running a startup control program like StartupCPL
http://www.mlin.net/StartupCPL.shtml
Turn off programs you don't need to run in the background, start them from Start -> All Programs when you want to run them.

Matt

 

I should have mentioned some other info. CPU usage is always 0-5% on average. Memory always has at least 1.5GB free. I checked all this in task manager. There is no hard disk usage either. It has nothing to do with start up programs.

this is what happens. I load my OS, everythign is fine. then I load a web download manager, azureus, firefox, opera, msn, winamp and a media player. as time goes by i load more and more firefox sites. I end up with on average 3-4 windows of firefox each with 5-10 tabs. Memory for firefox increase to around 700-1gb and only then will i have about 1.5GB of memory left. Eventually this weird issue starts. If i close some programs like firefox, the weird issue will eventually go away, but comes back. its on and off. sometimes it happens, so i just let my computer be for a bit and it starts to work again...but goes back to doin this stuff.

i am guessing windows just starts to stuff up like this after u load alot of applications.

 

One or two more suggestions, but it doesn't sound too much different from my computer. After I load quite a lot of programs, I expect Windows wants to start rearranging the data in the memory, the RAM might be starting to get hot. Windows will always leave plenty of space in the physical memory so it will farm out some to pagefile.

Do you have plenty of space on the Windows drive? Do you defragment occasionally? Clean out temp files? I clean them out in Control Panel -> Internet Options as well as in the browser program (Firefox for me). The antimalware will want to continually scan internet files, do phishing filters, etc.

Some websites are specific for the browser. For example, Firefox doesn't work correctly on the Microsoft website. I have found some websites that cause very high resource usage. Try running IE for a session or two to see if it makes a difference.

Have you modified your system very much? Do you run any programs that try to modify the system (one type I can think of is a memory "optimiser ")? You have probably seen that they are not recommended.

If my system starts to "drag ", I just go through and shut down things I have finished with. I believe it starts when Windows needs to start shuffling things around to accommodate them. Programs aren't specifically written for just one version of the OS, they try to cater for a wide variety and some "optimal function" might be lost. They might need patches to function correctly, but patches can sometimes be detrimental to performance. How do you judge when a program is perfect?

Matt

 

Maybe this link will help.
It has good info on reducing FF mem usage as well as some tips on windows mem usage in general.

<edit> An additional link.