Vista - Strange Problem - x.exe is not a valid Win32 application

I have a strange problem involving a machine running Windows Vista SP1.
The machine is a Intel Core 2 Duo @2.4 Ghz with 2 GB of RAM and 2 320 GB
Hard drives running in RAID 1. It has an ATI Radeon x1950.

I never shut my machine down unless I'm going on vacation, so I've noticed
that
every few days I obtain these symptoms:

- Some applications refuse to start, producing the error "x.exe is not a
valid Win32
application" .. Where x.exe could be anything, such as Firefox, cmd,
taskmgr, etc.
Some applications continue to run fine, other applications produce this
error even
though they are installed properly.
- CTRL-ALT-DEL stops working. No screen comes up asking what you want to do
anymore. Attempting to manually run taskmgr produces the symptom above.
- Windows refuses to shut down. Going through the start menu and clicking on
the Shutdown button results in nothing happening. Literally nothing. It just
sits there.

Now, the only recourse at this point in time is to hit the reset button, in
which case the system boots and behaves normally for another few days.

Now, a few things to know:
- I've scanned the entire system with Kaspersky's Anti-Virus product. There
are no viruses on the system that I'm aware of. AVG Free has not found any
viruses as well.
- I've disabled the Windows Search and Windows Prefetch services because I'm
tired of excessive disk activity.
- Rebooting fixes all of these problems for a few days and then this happens
again.

This occurs every few days, which may indicate a possible memory leak?

Any ideas? Anything to look for? Anything I should try to solve this? I
don't want to have to completely reinstall the OS if I don't have to.

Your participation is highly appreciated.

It sounds like either a hard drive has sectors that are corrupting and the data is being auto-recovered to other sectors, or bad sticks of memory.

Also if you leave Windows Search and Prefetch turned on the hard drive usage will die down after a while.

It actually ends up in less HD usage in the end since the data gets loaded into system memory which makes searches pretty darned quick.
"bbennett" <bbennett@xxxxxx> wrote in message news:ABA64EC7-DAB7-4857-A95C-B95BB87EB025@xxxxxx
I have a strange problem involving a machine running Windows Vista SP1.
The machine is a Intel Core 2 Duo @2.4 Ghz with 2 GB of RAM and 2 320 GB
Hard drives running in RAID 1. It has an ATI Radeon x1950.

I never shut my machine down unless I'm going on vacation, so I've noticed
that
every few days I obtain these symptoms:

- Some applications refuse to start, producing the error "x.exe is not a
valid Win32
application" .. Where x.exe could be anything, such as Firefox, cmd,
taskmgr, etc.
Some applications continue to run fine, other applications produce this
error even
though they are installed properly.
- CTRL-ALT-DEL stops working. No screen comes up asking what you want to do
anymore. Attempting to manually run taskmgr produces the symptom above.
- Windows refuses to shut down. Going through the start menu and clicking on
the Shutdown button results in nothing happening. Literally nothing. It just
sits there.

Now, the only recourse at this point in time is to hit the reset button, in
which case the system boots and behaves normally for another few days.

Now, a few things to know:
- I've scanned the entire system with Kaspersky's Anti-Virus product. There
are no viruses on the system that I'm aware of. AVG Free has not found any
viruses as well.
- I've disabled the Windows Search and Windows Prefetch services because I'm
tired of excessive disk activity.
- Rebooting fixes all of these problems for a few days and then this happens
again.

This occurs every few days, which may indicate a possible memory leak?

Any ideas? Anything to look for? Anything I should try to solve this? I
don't want to have to completely reinstall the OS if I don't have to.

Your participation is highly appreciated.

"bbennett" <bbennett@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:ABA64EC7-DAB7-4857-A95C-B95BB87EB025@xxxxxxI think your problems are probably created by having two anti-virus software programs.
Remove one or both for a while and see how your machine behaves.

I've got the exact same problems when my computer is running for a few days.

I did change my RAM-memory 4 times, no effect, so the problem is not corrupt memory..

All available upates from windows-update are installed, so thats the problem neither.

When anybody has got a solution for it, please let me know.

[My pc specs are: Windows Vista SP1; Intel Core2Quad 2.4Ghz; 4GB 667Mhz Ram; 2 HDD's (no raid); ASUS nVidia 8800 GTS 512]

It might help if we knew what the problem was. The solution for now is to
leave your computer turned off, you will no longer have the problem.

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"Maurice Bos" wrote in message news:200871613534maurice@xxxxxx

> From all appearances it's PEBKAC

PEBKAC is a very serious problem with Vista. Unfortunately, due to such
negative media coverage, the "source" of the PEBKAC error often believes
it's just Vista being "bad".

"Maurice Bos" wrote in message news:200871613534maurice@xxxxxxI assume you are posting to the thread - Strange Problem.
Have you looked in the Event Viewer logs?
Have you got Norton/Symantec on your system ?
Is your pc getting too hot ?
Do you need to leave it on permanently ?

In article <ABA64EC7-DAB7-4857-A95C-B95BB87EB025@xxxxxx>,
bbennett@xxxxxx says...If you have SP1 installed, there is a 'reliability and performance'
update that I think is not yet part of Windows Update.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/952709/en-us

One of the fixes:

? This update improves the reliability of Windows Vista SP1-based
computers that experience issues in which large applications cannot run
after the computer is turned on for extended periods of time. For
example, when you try to start Excel 2007 after the computer is turned
on for extended periods of time, a user may receive an error message
that resembles the following:
EXCEL.EXE is not a valid Win32 application

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law!!
http://home.att.net/~andyross

On my pc I had also have two anti-virus applications running. Uninstalled one of them, but still got the same problems. :-(

Maurice,
Would you like to share with us a description of "the same problem"?
Karl
"Maurice Bos" wrote in message news:20087185396maurice@xxxxxx
On my pc I had also have two anti-virus applications running. Uninstalled one of them, but still got the same problems. :-(