Odd Vista x64 freezeups. (Can't find resolution on the internet)

Greetings,

Any and all help to this problem would be greatly appreciated. The problem I am having is on a Gateway 7811FX running Windows Vista Premium x64. Starting 5 days ago Vista would freeze after resuming from sleep, or after a few hours of operation. Up until this point this laptop has functioned well since I got the laptop in August. The confusing points are.

-When Vista Freezes, you can move the mouse, click on your quicklaunch icons and see the button depress, but nothing happens. I've had iTunes running in the background and just stop AFTER the song completed.
-ctrl+alt+del CAN (20% of the time) bring up the selection menu, but attempting to open Task Manager has no result.
-Event viewer is clean with no error or notice reports in the time of the system freezeup.
-The only change to the system was the installation of Ventrillo, which has been removed and the issue persists.
-If I leave the laptop on, doing nothing, and come back to it after a few hours it will turn the screensaver off and show me the desktop, but perform as mentioned earlier.
-Virus and Spyware scans have been completed with no issue. To further troubleshoot, Virus scan was removed, but the problem persisted.
-A full checkdisk reports that the HD is fine with no errors.
-Unless I'm playing a game (5% of the time), the laptop's temperatures are low, so it is not overheating.
-Most recently I was playing WoW and tabbing between the game and Firefox and noticed that the system froze again, *but* I was able to tab back into WoW and continue playing as if nothing happened. When I exited the game to restart it just showed me the last screen viewed in the game.

Currently I am at a loss as all of the reporting tools in Vista are not indicating anything is wrong. I'm going to do a full scan of my memory to see if there is a faulty chip after I make this post, but if anyone has experienced anything similar to this, or has any thoughts please feel free to share.

A sincere thank you,

Chris

 

As a follow-up, the memory scan was clean.

 

Not sure if this will help or not (since you uninstalled) but the program may have changed a file.

Here are some links:

From the Ventrilo Tech Support Site


Major issue: Ventrilo freezes PC (~30seconds at a atime, mouse not frozen)

Good Luck

 

System Restore may be able to get you back to a working state.

 

Unfortunately all of my system restores are from today only, I'd need something at least 7 days back.

 

Thank you for the insight, unfortunately the article deals with freezing during use of Ventrilo, while this issue occurs when Ventrilo isn't running, and now, uninstalled.

 

If you've uninstalled Ventrilo and it's still causing problems, then it's most likely the case that Ventrilo didn't properly uninstall itself and has either left one of its components behind, or failed to reset a registry setting that it had tampered with when it was installed.

The thread you were linked to is a good source for trying to figure out what drivers it would have had to make a registry setting change for, and with that information you should be able to uninstall and then reinstall the affected driver(s) - like your audio drivers - to reset those registry settings and get rid of the carryover effect of Ventrilo.

You might also consider running something like CCleaner to root out any leftovers from the uninstallation of Ventrilo.

 

Your problem seems somewhat similar to what I had. Where I would go away or hibernate my laptop and when I come back click on programs or trying to open the task manager would not work. But the source of my problem was that a critical windows process did not load properly when I came back from hibernate or I accidently blocked it using my firewall.

Try having a file on your desktop like a word file or a .pdf file and click on it when you encounter this error again.

Usually, my browser would freeze and the quick launches would not work. However, I can still use the start menu but I can not open any programs or files.

 

I re-reviewed the thread in detail, and I didn't see any issues similar to what I am experiencing. They are all reporting issues related to the operation of the Ventrilo client and an issue with a USB keyboard that would freeze the system. My problems have always occurred outside of Ventrilo. There is a chance Ventrilo wasn't the root cause, but it does coincide with when the problems started.

On your suggestion I did fire up Ccleaner and ran a registry clean. I did notice some odd entries this time around referring to bad ActiveX command lines. I'll monitor this and see if there is any progress.

Thank you.

 

Sounds similar. Mine occurs 100% of the time after either awaking it from sleep, or if I let the screen saver come in it will freeze as mentioned about 70% of the time.

What is the purpose of the doc file on the desktop? In your instance if you opened it it would unfreeze the system?

Thanks for your help.

 

Update: Cleaning the registry via Ccleaner has had no effect. Also the problem seems to be getting progressively worse. It has completely frozen the computer twice in the past 3 hours while playing a game.

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

 

Is anything showing up in the device manager with a yellow exclamation point next to it, and is there anything showing up in your event logs?

 

I've been keeping a careful eye on the event logs. There hasn't been anything at all that would even remotely give me any insight into what's going on. The only error in the past two weeks (outside of abnormal shutdown), has been a HTTP error dealing with security authentication (which I'm aware of how and why it occured).

All drivers are being reported as up to date, and no hardware conflicts at this time.

Starting to see my fustration? I've been in IT for 13 years, and always abhor re-imaging a system or reloading the OS due to being unable to figure out a problem... but I'm really at a loss here. From experience in situations like this I eye the hard drive, but all tests have come up clean, even thorough surface scans. Also no abnormal sounds from the drive cage either. Then we have the fact that event viewer isn't reporting any concerning issues. The system isn't overheating, or even under strain 95% of the time an issue arises... Memory scans come up clean, I can do a CPU utilization test for 30 minutes and it won't lock up the system...

I'm hoping someone has come across something similar, or has a better understanding of Vista than I...

 

Try using this utility: DPC Latency Checker, to see if you can identify any process(es) that are experiencing significant latency; that might be a way of narrowing down exactly what's causing the problem.

 

An excellent DPC (and more) tool is Process Explorer. I actually haven't gone down that road yet so thank you for the idea. I'll investigate and report any findings.

(ps you can get Process Explorer at the following link, http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx)

 

After scrutinizing the processes and trimmed things down I'm currently sitting at 8 hours uptime without issue. I've even been able to put the computer into sleep mode and resume w/o issue. I'm not ready to even begin saying things are resolved, but I have a pretty strong theory as to the issue based on the changes I made.

My theory is that the way the 32 bit version of MagicISO integrates it's virtual drives with Vista 64 caused the problem. When Vista goes into an idle state (even while still on), it begins to shut drives down. Since it registers the virtual drives as physical, there might of been some procedural calls that failed and froze the system waiting for a response. What I can't explain is how it worked fine for many months, and just now started causing problems. My only guess would be that there was a dll file that Ventrilo overwrote, and started causing problems with MagicISO.

I'll keep an eye on stability, and if things keep going w/o issue, I'll nuke and reinstall MagicISO and see if it causes problems with Vent...

 

The Sysinternals' stuff is pure gold; I have, however, found that DPC latency checker can be a useful adjunct to process explorer.

 

Seems we aren't out of the woods yet. While I have noticed a significant increase in stability, it still freezes after resume from a screensaver, or sleep mode. Luckily it hasn't frozen during use again though.

 

A lot of notebooks have ... "issues" with sleep mode (don't know about screensaver), which are typically traced to the chipset. Even if you've got the latest chipset drivers installed, it might be worth your while to uninstall the chipset drivers, then reinstall them (using the most up-to-date, of course) to see if that helps any with the sleep issues.