Vista - eternal thinking

Vista Home Premium 32
Recently my pc seems to be 'thinking' almost constantly. That is, the
hour-glass equivalent seems to always be active as if its trying to open
an app or complete a task. How do I find out what it is trying to do?

j lunis wrote:
The First Question Of Troubleshooting: If the problem is new, what changed
between the time things worked and the time they didn't?

The Second Question of Windows Troubleshooting: what is the malware/virus
status of the machine? If you think it is clean, what programs (and
versions) did you use to determine this?

Be sure the computer is clean:
http://www.elephantboycomputers.com/...moving_Malware

For a real-time picture of what is going on, you can use the free Process
Monitor:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/s.../bb896645.aspx

See what is running at Startup with the free Autoruns:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/s.../bb963902.aspx

Malke
--
MS-MVP
Elephant Boy Computers - Don't Panic!
http://www.elephantboycomputers.com/#FAQ

Open Task Manager and sort on CPU usage. See what process is hogging everything. If it's not obvious then use other diagnostic tools as Malke suggested.

Also if you run with automatic updates allowed to just install unsupervised then it's tough to get a feel for your machine. I'm a believer in only changing one thing at a time. If you do put on updates, I'd recommend doing it manually, see if things seem ok for awhile, then do another one. If you change 8 things at once it makes it that much tougher to track down what happened. If you change one thing, stuff goes bad, chances of fixing it right away are a lot higher.

MilesAhead wrote:OK, I did that. Two apps seem to be related to the 'thinking.' First,
though, I said eternal thinking. Not quite right. It blinks on and off
- thinking for a few seconds, not for a few seconds. The app that seems
to change memory use with each on/off is rundll32 - Windows Host
Process. The other app that changes frequently with the on/off but not
every time is ccsvc??? - Symantec Service Framework. What have I learned?

With RunDLL you have to see what DLL it is running. It just loads a DLL into memory to run it(see tutorials how to use built in Task Manager or use a 3rd party one like DTask or one of the SysInternals process monitors/explorers.) With Symantec, if you have not paid for a subscription and are just running it as it came preinstalled(if it did) I would go to their site and download the appropriate removal tool. Take it all off. See if the problem goes away. If you paid them, then I'd get support from them.

There are several good free av programs around. If you like the Symantec and want to keep it then I'd check out their forum and seek a solution. If you find out what both those processes are and remove them but the problem persists, post back.

As alternative to av since you are running 32 bit, you can use Sandboxie. In fact if you go to Bits Du Jour I think it has a 51% off deal. I've been using it for years. Unfortunately it doesn't run on 64 bit systems. But it works on my 32 bit Vista,XP and W7 just fine.