XP OS Freezing

It is still not clear to me that you have determined if the problem will reproduce in safe mode or 'Diagnostic Startup (via msconfig). This is a critical point to clarify.

Assuming the above is 'no', i read this your problem is "After installing a real-time virus scanner, the machine will hard lock intermittently ".

It sounds to me like the flavor of AV you are using has a code defect in the filter driver portion of the software. This is a 'shim' driver that injects to intercept reads and writes to the hard drive. This is known fragile code, a wedge in a filter driver will lock the whole box.

You have a couple options. You can try running without your AV for a while, and do remote scanning from a second machine for your AV needs. By removing the filter driver, you do an easy elimination of the prime suspect, and this would be my recommendation.

If that doesn't yeild results, setup for a control-scroll-scroll dump, and drop the box in-state for microsoft tech support to analyze. You could be here for weeks trying to troubleshoot the problem away, without this dump analysis, its all just a guess as to whats hung

 

XP Freeze

Hi Joe - thanks for advise - it sounds to be on the right track but I report as follows.

I tried to run both operational PCs on diagnostic and with Norton Internet Security disabled - alternately on both PCs. Neither Freezes when running on diagnostic but both still freeze when running normally with just NIS disabled. I do not know if disabling NIS is sufficient or if it needs to be un-installed.

But it sounds like this is the type of error.

As regards your last para I am afraid I do not know how to do this. Microsoft site I have always found a bit impenitrable. Can you advise?

 

Sure. Getting to microsoft tech support is pretty easy. Go to http://support.microsoft.com right in the middle of the page there is a link for 'Contact Microsoft', that will walk you through the options.

However, If you feel pretty confident that you have narrowed it down to the AV software, there isnt anything Microsoft can do to help you besides confirm your research. Ultimatly, you need to contact the vendor of the software. You should go to thier web site to confirm you are running the very latest version of thier software. If so, you might consider 'back-revving' to an older version (in case this is a new bug). Other than that, you will need to talk with them to figure out what is going on.

In the short term, disabling firewall/AV software is ok for troubleshooting, but not recommended as a long term solution.

 

XP Freeze

Hi Joe
What I was trying to say in my last message was that I have pretty concusively established that it is not the AV software that is causing the problem because the problem still exists on 2 PCs when the AV is disabled.

The old PC I am running as a mule is running fine with Norton Internet Security (Firewall and AV combined), with MS Office 2000, Skype and Persono (Plantronics headset software).

So it seems to be something like what you described for the AV problem but not that itself.

Re contacting MS I do not understand your comment about setting up for dump dump etc

 

Ahh. i see the disconnect. The difference is that in diagnostic startup you have actually disabled the filter drivers from the AV software. Simply stopping the service doesnt affect the filter drivers that the AV installs. This is an unfortunate part of how those things work. As i read your description, you definatly have something installed that is causing you grief. You can try some guess and test tshooting if you wish, by actually uninstalling the software (which will remove the filter drivers usually). Its not uncommon to see more than one filter driver installed on a machine, it might be a different piece of software on your machine thats causing the problem, and since diagnostic startup disables them all, its masking the true culprit.

Don't worry about setting up for a dump, the guys at microsoft can talk you through how to do it. http://support.microsoft.com/?id=244139 if you want to get a head start.

 

XP Freeze

Thanks Joe

I will continue with the re-install on my mule for a couple more days and see if that shows up the faulty software. Then I will resort to MS.

Will keep you posted

 

XP Freeze

Hi Joe

What is the significance of when the freeze occurs. My mule has just started mis-behaving by freezing on boot. It freezes on the DOS screen when the moving guage has gone to about three-quarters. If I then re-boot again it always succeeds. This started after loading Skype and Persono but this may be just a coincidence if a boot freeze cannot be affected by programs running in Windows.

I tried uninstalling Skype and Persono but still have the problem but of course I guess uninstall would not remove all these programs had inserted.

 

Not convinced.

cmagee,

I can't help still feeling you have a trojan of some sort, because the problem involves several connected computers in the same fashion. Check this for example or recently, this.. You have the nwiz.exe file in the hijackthis log.

My video card uses an nvidia processor and I use NAV but I don't have that file.

 

XP Freeze

Hi Sparrow

The PCs are not connected, they are used independently other than sometimes using the same external LaCie drive to backup/store. Everything has been thoroughly virus checked and all definitions are up to date.

I am beginning to wonder if in fact I am unlucky enough to have 3 faulty hard drives because I just started to set up my main desktop again and it freezes as before during re-installation of XP. I had deleted the partition and fully reformatted it at the beginning of the process. Surely if the problem was software it could not survive that. See also above re boot problem with Dell.

 

XP Freeze

I forgot to mention in my response to Sparrow that at the 4th attempt I got XP to re-install but I wonder if it is worth going any further if what happened is conclusive proof of a hardware problem (hard-disk?) on this PC

 

Rehi cmagee,

Against the odds! Before you throw your disks, an idea:

I once had a problem I thought was a bad hdd and just for heck put linux on it. It worked fine, so I replaced linux with windows and it's still working. I have no explanation, but it worked.