StarDestroyer.Net BBS

I've been getting some strange freezes of the UI recently (on WinXP). Basicly, everything associated with explorer.exe freezes for a couple of seconds to a few minutes (taskbar, any open explorer windows, task manager). Also, during the freezes the hard drive indicator is on.

The wierd part is the rest of the system works and is responsive. Firefox works without issues, Nero keeps burning the DVD, DC++ works (altough it also gets a UI freeze, the actual connections keep working).

From what I've been reading around, the sympthoms indicate a failing hard disk. The reason I'm asking here is I'm interested if anyone encoutered similar problems and what they turned out to be since my googlefu seems to be weak with this issue, only getting a couple of semi-decent hits (the ones pointing in the direction of one of the hard disks) while on the other hand I've seen a fair share of failing hard drives and I've yet to encounter anything similar, especialy since I'm not getting any data corruption CHKDSK-at-startup stuff which usualy is the first sign of a failing hard disk.

Any help would be appreciated.

I assume you've ran the usual spyware scans, HijackThis! logs, and anti-virus scans, yes?

Yes, of course, nothing interesting to report. Plus the computer is sitting behind both a hardware and software firewall with only several ports I need opened, all of which are way out of the usual range. Also use Firefox for browsing and I haven't been opening any useless e-mails for a while now. So the infection vector is rather low, comparativly.

It's a possibility that there might be a corrupted sys file or something of that nature. Have you tried running windows repair from your install disk?

No, although I doubt that is the problem since this issue appeared recently and I had replaced my system drive some 2 weeks before the issue appeared.

mmar wrote:No, although I doubt that is the problem since this issue appeared recently and I had replaced my system drive some 2 weeks before the issue appeared.

No offense intended, but defunct system files need by no means be an indication of a physically bad drive. From what you've told us so far, this sounds a lot more like a SW than a HW problem to me. I rather second Tokaji's recommendation of a repair off the install disk(s).