Two Vista Issues

I'm using 64 bit Vista Ultimate on my laptop (I also did a clean install) and everything would be perfect except for two issues I'm having:

My first issue is when a program stops responding. Now on my old computer, which had XP, when a program stopped responding I could open up the task manager and just end the program through there. Right now on my laptop when any program stops responding, the moment I try to open or close ANY window, the entire computer locks up and I am forced to power the computer off and turn it back on to get it working again (and a few times these hard resets have forced Vista to do a disk check). I'm wondering if there is a way to fix this because I'm certain this shouldn't be happening. The weird part of it is that say if I have firefox and AIM open and firefox stops responding. If I have an AIM chat open with someone else I can continue chatting with them, but if I try to close firefox, close any AIM window, open up the task manager, or pretty much try anything at all, the computer freezes. Anyone know how to fix this?

My other issue is fairly minor because I usually just put my laptop to sleep, but whenever I start up Vista and log in, it sits on the desktop doing nothing for about a minute (and as far as I can tell neither the processor nor hard drive are very active at this point), and then after that minute then anything that is supposed to start with Vista runs (for example my video drivers, some Thinkvantage utilities, and AIM).

 

it sounds like you might have a borked installation. i've never had any program bring down the entire OS, or make it unresponsive to the point of rebooting. firefox has jammed on me a couple of times, but what will happen is that the application window will fade out, a '(Not Responding)' will be inserted into the title bar, and an hour glass will appear whenever you focus on the application. i haven't had any issue bringing up task manager or selecting other apps while this is going on.

as to the startup issue - i've seen this on XP numerous times, but not yet on Vista. what you could try is forcing the OS to optimize it's boot files in case the bottleneck is the harddisk - go to an elevated cmd prompt and type in 'defrage.exe c: -b' without the quotes.

 

So I guess my only solution to the first problem would be reinstalling windows?

 

Anyone? I really don't want to reinstall Windows unless I really have to.

 

I don't think you have a bad installation. Vista 64 seems to hang up with some applications from time to time. It has to do with some disk activity confusion- if you open the resource monitor then when this happens, often you can switch to the resource monitor (not always) and see that the disk activity is pegged at 100% requests and no throughput.

I am pretty sure this is some sort of misfeature of Vista 64 - I have all the correct drivers for my machine.