Taskbar freezes for a while and then recovers

Youli · #1 05-11-2005, 11:30 AM

Hi everybody!
Here's my problem: My taskbar stops responding every now and then for a few minutes, and then all windows I've opened in the meantime appear altogether. Even ctrl+alt+del doesn't work. I formatted my system twice, but no luck. I'm booting from a sata disk, if that matters. I've installed all service packs and updates for xp pro edition. It seems that those terrible balloons just don't want to appear and they cause the problem. I'm using bitdefender and spybot and I've checked my system more than once for adware or viruses. Any ideas?

Ant · #2 05-11-2005, 11:37 PM

I'd guess at low system resources. What're your machines specs? Does this happen only when you're online or all the time?

Take a look here: http://www.techbargains.com/hottips/hottip12/index.cfm

for some tips on improving perormance

Youli · #3 05-12-2005, 05:30 AM

Thank you very much for your answer!

Well, it's a P4 3,20, 1,00 GB of RAM, M/B ASUS P4C800.
It should be able to manage everything all right.

When it stops hanging, everything opens up whithin a split second.
I've created a swap partition of 2 GB (FAT 32) and my hard disk is SATA 250GB (divided into partitions).
And yes, this usually happens when I'm connected to the internet.
I'm using spybot, bitdefender 8 pro and I've performend an on-line scan by norton antivirus. Everything looks clean....

Qdos · #4 05-12-2005, 06:26 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Youli

Thank you very much for your answer!

Well, it's a P4 3,20, 1,00 GB of RAM, M/B ASUS P4C800.
It should be able to manage everything all right.

When it stops hanging, everything opens up whithin a split second.
I've created a swap partition of 2 GB (FAT 32) and my hard disk is SATA 250GB (divided into partitions).
And yes, this usually happens when I'm connected to the internet.
I'm using spybot, bitdefender 8 pro and I've performend an on-line scan by norton antivirus. Everything looks clean....

Why FAT32 for paging? Surely NTFS would be more efficient. See if that improves things for you.

I would *only* recommend NTFS nine times of out of ten for W2k onwards, it would help if you stated why you wanted FAT32... I would suggest you make all your partitions the same file system type and think about allocation of the paging file across all partitions as opposed to making it separate. Even with NCQ functions on SATA your design is making the hard disk work harder than it really needs to.

Youli · #5 05-12-2005, 06:54 AM

I wanted to use that partition as swap for Fedora, as well. I will change it to NTFS and see what happens, though I used C as swap (which is NTFS - all other partitions are NTFS and I've kept some unpartitioned space in order to install Fedora later) and nothing changed.

Qdos · #6 05-12-2005, 07:28 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Youli

I wanted to use that partition as swap for Fedora, as well. I will change it to NTFS and see what happens, though I used C as swap (which is NTFS - all other partitions are NTFS and I've kept some unpartitioned space in order to install Fedora later) and nothing changed.

I do not think either Microsoft or RedHat would recommend you share the same partition on a local disk as a combined swapfile for two different OS's and I can easily imagine you will have caused yourself problems unless you have run a "clear swapfile at log off" command for BOTH systems.

What do you think XP would make of opening the Fedora swapfile? I would suggest it would cause Explorer to crash at the very least.

Youli · #7 05-12-2005, 11:03 PM

That could be an issue IF I had Fedora installed. Haven't done it yet, so it can't be the problem.
When I'll install Fedora, I'll take into consideration your remarks, you are right. Thanks!

bzouchir · #8 05-24-2005, 06:00 AM

Hi all!

I'm actually having the same problem here!
Each time I connect to the internet with dial up connection, the taskbar freezes, and then all windows that I clicked open at the same time after a period of time. It's been happening along time now!

II have an external hard disk connected on USB 2 port, and I realized that whenever thios taskbar freezes, I disconnect the hard disk thenm connect it again, and the taskbar works again normal. SO I'm doing it each time I connect to the internet.

Does anyone know how to fix this problem or what could possibly be causing this really annoying thing?

Cheers!

Youli · #9 05-24-2005, 06:06 PM

Well, I corrected the problem

after performing a third format, and I have a theory.
There are 2 things I dindn't do this time. First of all, I didn't install all the updates for my audio card, which is a creative autigy 2 zs pro.
The second thing I didn't do was to move the language bar after the installation of .NET framework. I noticed that, when installing it (either it, either the 1st service pack, I'm not 100% sure), after the first reboot, the language bar desides to move to the middle of the task bar. I'm 100% sure that I moved this language bar during the 2nd format and 99% sure that I moved it during the 1st format.

Do any of the above apply for you?

bzouchir · #10 05-24-2005, 06:33 PM

Hi Youli,

About the language bar I'm not sure at all of what I did in mine, do you think the position of it is doing this? It shouldn't be related.

Here Sheck out this link:

http://www.techspot.com/vb/all/windo...r-Freezes.html

I hope I'll find my answer there

thx.

Youli · #11 05-25-2005, 01:43 AM

That link includes posts covering many different issues.
I found a way to make the problem less obvious, by disabling the internet connection icon from the notification area (And its balloon. I have a feeling that balloons are part of the problem.). Then, I totally disabled the notification area (that way my computer never froze, but the notification area can be useful). I'm using bitdefender and my network card is on-board (ASUS P4C800). My resources are good enough, and now my pc is running ALL the programs and applications it did before, when I had the problem. Where does that leeds us to? Close Windows and open doors

...
P.S. Let me know if you found what's causing the problem, I'm curious.

ags · #12 06-01-2005, 04:45 AM

I had the same problem with the frozen taskbar, coming back after some minutes, and all the windows of programs that I had tried to open in the mean time popping up then at the same time.
Disabling the notification area (info tray) didn' help me, so I reenabled it.
Finally I found out, that the problem was caused by outlook. It tried to connect to the exchange server with a wrong method first, and only after a timeout everything worked. The problem was solved by changning
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Exchange\Exc hange Provider]
"Rpc_Binding_Order"=
from "ncalrpc,ncacn_ip_tcp,ncacn_spx,ncacn_np,netbios,n cacn_vns_spp"
to "ncacn_ip_tcp,ncacn_spx,ncacn_np,netbios,ncacn_vns _spp,ncalrpc"

Best regards, ags