Issues with DWM...any advice?

Alright, this has been happening for a while now on my Latitude D630 (specs: Core 2 Duo T7100, 4GB of RAM, Intel X3100 graphics) My computer will occasionally do this weird behavior where what's displayed on screen will "Freeze" in place. I can move my mouse around and click and also seemingly launch things, but I can't see what's going on behind the "Frozen" screen. I can do a ctrl+alt+delete to get to the Windows Security screen, but when i click "start task manager," it seemingly appears behind the frozen screen so I can't do anything.

Sometimes it'll sort it out on it's own in some time, the screen will flash and then Aero will reset. A "Desktop Window Manager not responding" popup will happen and things will be fine.

Other times though, it'll just stick like that. In the past, I've just figured it was something wrong with the machine so I did a hard shutdown. I even reinstalled windows a few times. This has lasted through a RAM upgrade with all new RAM so obviously that couldn't be the case.

This latest case, I found that I was able to get DWM to reset by launching the Run... box and launching explorer.exe from behind the "frozen" screen.

I'm honestly at a loss. The X3100 drivers haven't been updated in years, I have the latest non Dell customized version.

Any suggestions? I would simply go back to Windows Classic, but I've found on two different machines (this D630 and my netbook) that going back to Windows Classic results in very flaky behavior in terms of windowing performance: It's fast but there's some artifacting, and some windows (WLM for instance, sometimes turn into blank black squares)...it's as if they somehow made the legacy Window Manager worse somehow compared to XP, I even have a XP machine with 2 GB of RAM to compare it to.

 

Probably not related, but do you already have the latest BIOS?

 

Yup, sure am, A17.

 

Have you tried checking if your RAM is all good?

Did you experience the issues with the Dell versions as well?

 

Haven't checked the RAM, but this started occurring during my time with the Dell supplied 2 GB of RAM. I replaced all of that RAM with 4 GB of RAM. I can always do a memtest86 overnight just to be sure.

I haven't run the Dell driver in ages, I can try rolling back to the Dell driver.

 

it did it again just a minute ago...I'm reverting to the Dell driver to see if it changes anything.