leaving pc working at night, makes it unresponsive in the morning

[colore]

hello

after leaving the pc all night without shutting it down, in the morning it is very unresponsive (clicking to open a window takes many seconds, etc)

which can be the cause and the solution?

the specs are AMD 1090T with 4GB RAM, 500GB disk and 512MB onboard graphics, with an otherwise stable and responsive XP SP3 installation, without much bloatware and malware free (at least since antivir is running)

thanks

[Guest]

Have you opened task manager and looked at the system load when this happens? Maybe you got a leaky app eating up ram.

You say it is very unresponsive. Does it go away after a while or do you need to reboot?

[colore]

Have you opened task manager and looked at the system load when this happens? Maybe you got a leaky app eating up ram.

You say it is very unresponsive. Does it go away after a while or do you need to reboot?

precisely, it is not totally unresponsive, it has very low responsiveness

for example, it takes many seconds before a window actually maximizes, when I click its taskbar button

this behaviour does not go at all, it continues like this even if I kill via Task Manager the most memory hungry processes (firefox and opera that take each about 300,000 K of "Memory Usage" as shown in Task Manager)

in Task Manager, CPU does not look too much loaded (it's below 5%) and PF Usage is 1,8GB (to be honest, even now PF Usage is 1.44GB but the system is totally responsive)

after eventually trying to reboot, I get an error sayings that .NET BroadcastEventWindow does not respond to shut down and after that I get an error that explorer.exe does not respond to shut down, but both apps after waiting a bit, shut down themselves, without me having to force them

after reboot the system is OK

I made some research about .NET BroadcastEventWindow and it seems I must install .NET Framework 1.1, I did so and I will wait to see if this will fix that strange problem

by the way, is there a method to free up "PF Usage" ?

[allen2]

It might be an explorer extension using .net that is leaking as -X- said before.

[cluberti]

Seems the most likely culprit, given that the specific function in your error message from the .NET runtime is a broadcast event. Unless you have a service or taskbar applet running that is .net based, it's an explorer shell extension. Whatever it is, it's trying to broadcast a window change event (which goes through shell32 to explorer, which handles... the shell ) and something has hung it up. Might be worth using autoruns to disable anything non-MS that isn't necessary to boot before you leave at night, reboot, and then leave the system up overnight. When you come back in the morning, see if it is the same or if the problem does not appear.