Question: Cascading freezes

Datana · Post by **Datana** » 2007-05-12 02:58am

This has been happening more and more often to me in the past few weeks, and nothing that I've Googled indicates a solution. I was wondering if anyone here knows what is going on.

My home desktop system is an Athlon XP 3000+ on an Asus A7N8X Deluxe motherboard running Windows XP SP2. Occasionally, when hitting 100% CPU usage, one program will get "stuck" and freeze up, stealing all of the CPU time for itself and remaining that way until manually killed via the Task Manager. If I kill it, one or two other programs, seemingly at random, will freeze up with the same behaviour. If I kill those processes, the same applies, until practically everything is frozen or killed (hence, my reference to them as "cascade" freezes). I cannot restart a killed program without it freezing up again immediately. I can, however, contain the effect to the first program hit by it by reducing it to lowest thread priority and minimizing it (it still eats up 100% CPU when "idling," but will give it up if something else asks for it) -- this still leaves the first affected program unusable, though.

Once this starts, the only treatment is a cold restart. A soft restart or simply hitting the reset button results in something locking up as soon as I log into Windows again. Cutting power, waiting a minute, and restarting resumes normal behaviour, at least until it decides to manifest this problem again. This first started happening a few months ago and showed up once a week or so, but has been getting progressively worse; as of this week, it happens roughly once a day.

Spyware or viruses are not the problem; I've combed it over myself, suspecting that, and have come up empty. RAM (which I initially suspected due to cold restarts being the only fix) can probably be ruled out, as it ran Memtest86 for twenty cycles without problems. I've not been able to invoke the symptoms under a Linux live CD (using mprime to dive up CPU usage and hopefully force a freeze), so I'm leaning towards a software problem. At this point, I'm tempted to nuke my OS partition and start that over to see if it'll help.

This has me completely stumped. If anyone can tell me what might be the cause for this, I'd appreciate it!

Braedley · Post by **Braedley** » 2007-05-12 11:02am

Since it's not a virus, I'm tempted to say that it's a problem with the windows scheduler. How you fucked up the scheduler I will never know, but what you are describing would be caused by such a fuckup. You might be able to repair the install, but we all know how unreliable the repair windows procedure is. Stupid question, but are you also running Norton? Not that it would cause the cascade, and not that you can actually change the base priority of it, but the latest version has been known to suck up all the processing time indescrectionately.

Datana · Post by **Datana** » 2007-05-12 02:25pm

I'm running AVG for antivirus and Kerio for firewalling. I haven't touched anything Symantec since 2003, and that was the corporate-edition Symantec Antivirus rather than the consumer-grade Norton.

I'll see what I can do about the scheduler.

Xon · Post by **Xon** » 2007-05-12 03:09pm

This sounds like a harddrive issue and/or motherboard issue.

Run "eventvwr.msc" and look under the "System" tab to see if you are getting any disk errors (things with red or yellow symbols in the Type column).

Datana · Post by **Datana** » 2007-05-12 03:33pm

Xon wrote:This sounds like a harddrive issue and/or motherboard issue.

Run "eventvwr.msc" and look under the "System" tab to see if you are getting any disk errors (things with red or yellow symbols in the Type column).

No errors or warnings of any type, apart from an occasionally recurring time server warning (which match up with times Comcast has been down in my area) and one or two DCOM errors.

Xon · Post by **Xon** » 2007-05-13 12:13pm

My only other guess is overheating. Try cleaning out the CPU heatsink and other heatsinks on the computer. Make sure you pin the fans so they cant freely spin if you blow on them or use a can of compressed air (spin too fast and they'll burn out)

Braedley · Post by **Braedley** » 2007-05-13 03:47pm

I would be very surprised if this were hardware. My prime candidate would be the windows kernel. Another possibility would be that a very high priority program is stuck in a loop that causes is to hold. While holding, another program is being returned to. However, this doesn't seem likely.