After SP2 Installed: Freezes Requiring Power-Off Reboot

[Fay Kalyus]

My system (Windows XP Home) ran perfectly BEFORE I installed SP2. It almost
never crashed, and the few times it did, I could identify the precise
circumstances and simply avoid them. So as far as Windows XP was concerned,
I was one happy camper.

However, since I installed Service Pack 2, I worry about surfing the
internet, because that is when I get hit by the problem ...

Everything will be going just fine. Then suddenly, my mouse cursor freezes.
Moving the mouse does nothing. The keyboard is unresponsive. Pressing
Ctrl-Alt-Del doesn't work. So thorough is the lock-up that I have to press
the Power switch for five seconds to turn everything off, then boot the
machine again.

While I cannot make the problem occur "on demand", it does seem MUCH more
likely when I have two or three downloads going at once AND I'm browsing
another page in my browser (Mozilla -- but I believe I've seen this with
Internet Explorer, too, with multiple browser windows open.)

The problem does not seem to occur AT ALL unless I'm doing something on the
net.

I've got the Windows Firewall going AND BlackICE, but I haven't updated the
latter in months, so I know it works. (I use both because I want the new
firewall's outgoing permission-by-program AND I want BlackICE's ability to
block specific port TCP and UDP port numbers. BlackICE's Application
Protection is turned OFF.)

Also running at any given time is (in my tray) Macro Express, Socke****ch
(time-of-day clock corrector), Norton AntiVirus and an offsite backup
scheduler. All of these were installed long before SP2 and they never
caused any problems.

Oh, one other peculiarity: since I installed SP2, it seems to me that
backspacing in an editor (such as Outlook's News editor, or NoteTab, or
Pegasus Mail) is much slower than it used to be. How weird is that? I'm
quite sure this is not just my imagination.

Prior to SP2, the only time I ever saw this kind of lock-up happen was when
I would set up an FTP session with FTP Commander, with the AOL client
running as well, and I'd tell FTP Command to disconnect.

Anyway, does anybody have any suggestions? The freeze seems to be caused by
something going horribly wrong when I've got multiple internet sessions
going at once.

- Timothy Campbell
www.tc123.com

[Rock]

Fay Kalyus wrote:

> My system (Windows XP Home) ran perfectly BEFORE I installed SP2. It almost
> never crashed, and the few times it did, I could identify the precise
> circumstances and simply avoid them. So as far as Windows XP was concerned,
> I was one happy camper.
>
> However, since I installed Service Pack 2, I worry about surfing the
> internet, because that is when I get hit by the problem ...
>
> Everything will be going just fine. Then suddenly, my mouse cursor freezes.
> Moving the mouse does nothing. The keyboard is unresponsive. Pressing
> Ctrl-Alt-Del doesn't work. So thorough is the lock-up that I have to press
> the Power switch for five seconds to turn everything off, then boot the
> machine again.
>
> While I cannot make the problem occur "on demand", it does seem MUCH more
> likely when I have two or three downloads going at once AND I'm browsing
> another page in my browser (Mozilla -- but I believe I've seen this with
> Internet Explorer, too, with multiple browser windows open.)
>
> The problem does not seem to occur AT ALL unless I'm doing something on the
> net.
>
> I've got the Windows Firewall going AND BlackICE, but I haven't updated the
> latter in months, so I know it works. (I use both because I want the new
> firewall's outgoing permission-by-program AND I want BlackICE's ability to
> block specific port TCP and UDP port numbers. BlackICE's Application
> Protection is turned OFF.)
>
> Also running at any given time is (in my tray) Macro Express, Socke****ch
> (time-of-day clock corrector), Norton AntiVirus and an offsite backup
> scheduler. All of these were installed long before SP2 and they never
> caused any problems.
>
> Oh, one other peculiarity: since I installed SP2, it seems to me that
> backspacing in an editor (such as Outlook's News editor, or NoteTab, or
> Pegasus Mail) is much slower than it used to be. How weird is that? I'm
> quite sure this is not just my imagination.
>
> Prior to SP2, the only time I ever saw this kind of lock-up happen was when
> I would set up an FTP session with FTP Commander, with the AOL client
> running as well, and I'd tell FTP Command to disconnect.
>
> Anyway, does anybody have any suggestions? The freeze seems to be caused by
> something going horribly wrong when I've got multiple internet sessions
> going at once.
>
> - Timothy Campbell
> www.tc123.com
>
>

Have you tried disabling one of the firewalls to see if there is a
conflict. Disable first one, then the other.

[Fay Kalyus]

"Rock" > wrote in message
...
>
> Have you tried disabling one of the firewalls to see if there is a
> conflict. Disable first one, then the other.

I thought of doing that, but I was hoping to avoid that approach, since
neither firewall by itself offers complete protection. (See footnote)
Since I can't make the freeze-up occur at will, turning off one firewall or
the other might mean running for a few days with only one firewall in place.
And given Microsoft's track record for security holes, I'm not keen to run
with ONLY their firewall operating! (I'm not a Microsoft-basher, but I'm
not blind, either.)

I suppose I could turn off the new Windows firewall, since somehow I managed
to survive for years without it. But before I do that, I'm hoping that
something I wrote in my original post sounds familiar to somebody. At the
very least, I'm hoping somebody could tell me how I can make the problem
occur on purpose, so I can test alternative configurations. Otherwise, I'm
just shooting in the dark, never knowing whether or not I've actually solved
the problem.

Actually, I'm not even sure that I CAN really, truly turn the new Windows
firewall "off". I half suspect that all I can do is tell it "don't do
anything". My guess is that it is now so thoroughly integrated into the
operating system that all you can do is tell it to play dead. That's not
the same as actually making it NOT run on my machine.

- Timothy Campbell
www.tc123.com

Footnote: BlackICE could offer complete protection all by itself, if only
they'd allow definable exceptions for certain executables. I write programs
(in Delphi), and every time I recompile, BlackICE wants the "new" program to
be approved. This is so annoying that I turned their "Application
Protection" feature off. There's no way to tell BlackICE "always assume
such-and-such a program is okay". I've written to them with that
suggestion, but that was well over a year ago. The new (SP2) Windows
firewall, on the other hand, only bothers to ask about programs that
actually access the net. Thus, running both firewalls gives me all the
features I want, while running only one of them does only half the job.