UI lockup on W2K

[aurgathor]

Lately (last 6 - 9 months or) I'm having problems with the W2K UI locking up for seemingly no reason.

What happens is that the display gets frozen and the mouse and keyboard stops working, but underneath W2K, and presumably most programs continue running just fine. I know this because shared directories are fully accessible through the network, and because I run a server and I can log onto that server from another PC.

I'm not 100% of what triggers this, but last time it was most likely the connection of a USB headset while the last 2 - 3 times before that it may have been a mouse or keyboard event. The frequency of these lock ups isn't too bad, say, roughly 1 - 2/month, but a couple of years ago the very same PC could run for several months without any problem, and downtimes were usually caused by power outages or windowsupdate reboots.

BTW, the last time it happened Winamp was playing, and it continued the song it started before the lockup, but didn't start the next one.

Any idea on what may be causing this, and how to fix it?

TIA

[eyeball]

Does it happen in safe mode? if it doesnt then try to think what third party products and drivers you have installed, chances are they are causing the hangs

[touchstone_81]

hmm if this is a production server then i dont think running winamp or plugging in headsets to listen to songs on servers is a good idea.

Anyways since this is happening intermittently the best way to troubleshoot this would be to look at the event logs, dr watson logs etc.I would also advice you to run a spyware/antivirus scan on this machine.

[aurgathor]

This happens too infrequently to bother with safe mode. And I don't think many of the programs would run correctly. As for the eventlog, there's nothing in there that can be associated with the lockup.

[cluberti]

You might want to configure the machine for a complete memory dump, in this case, and then crash the box when the problem happens again.