Weird random application hang problem

Weird random application hang problem

I am trying to understand an application hang problem that started up lately on my Windows XP system. The system runs fine for days (sometimes) without ever shutting down or putting it to sleep, but the problem first shows up as one of the apps hanging. The application's UI stops responding or one or more background threads hang, so even though the GUI is responding, it is not doing anything (e.g., in VirtualDub's case, the UI responds fine, but the job doesn't progress and I won't even be able to abort it).

Asked by: Guest | Views: 235

Total answers/comments: 1

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Guest [Entry]

"I don't know how useful this information is going to be for others, but I tracked my problem down to ctfmon.exe. This process is supposed to be helper program for MS office, but the fact is I never installed MS office on this desktop (I use OO). Now, for the reason for suspecting this... every time the system hung and I initiated a reboot, one program had to be always killed to be able to shutdown the system, and that process is ctfmon. When I looked up information, many people had issues with it hanging during reboot, but none reported an issue with processes going 100% CPU. In any case, I went ahead and disabled it following this MS article and I am yet to see the 100% CPU issue in the last couple of weeks.

I now have a different issue, specifically system spending a lot of time in hardware interrupts after resuming from standby, but I think this is a different issue and am yet to research into this. Seems like hibernate doesn't have the same issue, so I am using hibernate instead S3 standby for now."