Program Not Responding

I frequently get the error message, "Program Not Responding" when I
try to save a file I'm working on, or close the program. This happens
frequently but not always. That is, about half of the time I do this
everything works as it should.

When the file save operation hangs up, if I just wait a minute or so
the program will start responding and the file will be saved, then all
goes well for a while. This is happening in all of my client software,
not just one specific program.

This is a home built computer with an ASUS P7P55D Motherboard, running
Windows 7, 64 bit Home Premium.

Memory 3.99 GB
Processor Intel Core i7

This computer has three hard drives, C, D & F. C is used for the
client software, D is used for the work files and F is used for
automated backups. Each of these drives is a Western Digital 565 GB
and they each show about 2/3 of the drive as unused space.

I certainly would appreciate any suggestions. I've tried updating all
my drivers with Driver Detective. I've also checked for on-line
updates for my OS and client software. All seem to be up to date.

Gordon

On Sun, 10 Jun 2012 08:28:44 -0700, Evan Platt
wrote:

On Sun, 10 Jun 2012 10:14:58 -0500, Antares 531
wrote:

I frequently get the error message, "Program Not Responding" when I
try to save a file I'm working on, or close the program. This happens
frequently but not always. That is, about half of the time I do this
everything works as it should.

When the file save operation hangs up, if I just wait a minute or so
the program will start responding and the file will be saved, then all
goes well for a while. This is happening in all of my client software,
not just one specific program.

This is a home built computer with an ASUS P7P55D Motherboard, running
Windows 7, 64 bit Home Premium.

Memory 3.99 GB
Processor Intel Core i7

This computer has three hard drives, C, D & F. C is used for the
client software, D is used for the work files and F is used for
automated backups. Each of these drives is a Western Digital 565 GB
and they each show about 2/3 of the drive as unused space.

I certainly would appreciate any suggestions. I've tried updating all
my drivers with Driver Detective. I've also checked for on-line
updates for my OS and client software. All seem to be up to date.

No, don't mention the program name or anything.

Have you tried updating or removing and reinstalling whatever this
mystery program is?

This happens with all my programs. I use MS Office and a few other
client software programs, but they all have the same problem when I
try to save a file that has been modified or just created. Gordon

On Sun, 10 Jun 2012 10:35:30 -0500, Antares 531 wrote:

On Sun, 10 Jun 2012 08:28:44 -0700, Evan Platt
wrote:

On Sun, 10 Jun 2012 10:14:58 -0500, Antares 531
wrote:

I frequently get the error message, "Program Not Responding" when I try
to save a file I'm working on, or close the program. This happens
frequently but not always. That is, about half of the time I do this
everything works as it should.

When the file save operation hangs up, if I just wait a minute or so
the program will start responding and the file will be saved, then all
goes well for a while. This is happening in all of my client software,
not just one specific program.

This is a home built computer with an ASUS P7P55D Motherboard, running
Windows 7, 64 bit Home Premium.

Memory 3.99 GB
Processor Intel Core i7

This computer has three hard drives, C, D & F. C is used for the
client software, D is used for the work files and F is used for
automated backups. Each of these drives is a Western Digital 565 GB and
they each show about 2/3 of the drive as unused space.

I certainly would appreciate any suggestions. I've tried updating all
my drivers with Driver Detective. I've also checked for on-line updates
for my OS and client software. All seem to be up to date.

No, don't mention the program name or anything.

Have you tried updating or removing and reinstalling whatever this
mystery program is?

This happens with all my programs. I use MS Office and a few other
client software programs, but they all have the same problem when I try
to save a file that has been modified or just created. Gordon

Has this been on-going for a long time or did it just start happening
recently? Since it's happening with all apps, it could be the OS has
broken. Or you could have been infected by malware. The next time it
happens, bring up the task manager, and see if the CPU is being tied up
by a particular process. When it happens with another app, see if it's
the same or different process.

I'd also suggest that you do a full malware scan using the free versions
of AntiMalwareBytes and SuperAntiSyware.

If the problem persists, then a Repair install of W7 might be prudent.

Stef

On Sun, 10 Jun 2012 10:35:30 -0500, Antares 531
wrote:

On Sun, 10 Jun 2012 08:28:44 -0700, Evan Platt
wrote:

On Sun, 10 Jun 2012 10:14:58 -0500, Antares 531
wrote:

I frequently get the error message, "Program Not Responding" when I
try to save a file I'm working on, or close the program. This happens
frequently but not always. That is, about half of the time I do this
everything works as it should.

When the file save operation hangs up, if I just wait a minute or so
the program will start responding and the file will be saved, then all
goes well for a while. This is happening in all of my client software,
not just one specific program.

This is a home built computer with an ASUS P7P55D Motherboard, running
Windows 7, 64 bit Home Premium.

Memory 3.99 GB
Processor Intel Core i7

This computer has three hard drives, C, D & F. C is used for the
client software, D is used for the work files and F is used for
automated backups. Each of these drives is a Western Digital 565 GB
and they each show about 2/3 of the drive as unused space.

I certainly would appreciate any suggestions. I've tried updating all
my drivers with Driver Detective. I've also checked for on-line
updates for my OS and client software. All seem to be up to date.

No, don't mention the program name or anything.

Have you tried updating or removing and reinstalling whatever this
mystery program is?

This happens with all my programs. I use MS Office and a few other
client software programs, but they all have the same problem when I
try to save a file that has been modified or just created. Gordon

This is a general system performance problem with many possible
causes.
http://speedmaxpc.com/speed/booster/...FYwQfAodbGMDVw
does a good clean up but it's not free!

Steve

--
Neural Network Software. http://www.npsl1.com
EasyNN-plus. Neural Networks plus. http://www.easynn.com
SwingNN. Forecast with Neural Networks. http://www.swingnn.com
JustNN. Just Neural Networks. http://www.justnn.com

Antares 531 wrote:
I frequently get the error message, "Program Not Responding" when I
try to save a file I'm working on, or close the program. This happens
frequently but not always. That is, about half of the time I do this
everything works as it should.

When the file save operation hangs up, if I just wait a minute or so
the program will start responding and the file will be saved, then all
goes well for a while. This is happening in all of my client software,
not just one specific program.

This is a home built computer with an ASUS P7P55D Motherboard, running
Windows 7, 64 bit Home Premium.

Memory 3.99 GB
Processor Intel Core i7

This computer has three hard drives, C, D& F. C is used for the
client software, D is used for the work files and F is used for
automated backups. Each of these drives is a Western Digital 565 GB
and they each show about 2/3 of the drive as unused space.

I certainly would appreciate any suggestions. I've tried updating all
my drivers with Driver Detective. I've also checked for on-line
updates for my OS and client software. All seem to be up to date.

Gordon

1. Check for memory-hogging things. Task-manager, Processes, CPU usage
column.
2. Full disk-scans (check report well) and defrags.
3. Malware scans. Use an AV that you don't usually use.
4. Event Viewer, Windows Logs.

You're batting in the dark until you get some feedback about just where
the problem is. Your efforts should go to system-monitoring to track
down the bottle-neck.

Ed

On Sun, 10 Jun 2012 17:31:03 +0100, Stephen Wolstenholme
wrote:

This is a general system performance problem with many possible
causes.
http://speedmaxpc.com/speed/booster/...FYwQfAodbGMDVw
does a good clean up but it's not free!

How is that thing not snake oil?

--

Char Jackson

"Char Jackson" wrote in message
...
On Sun, 10 Jun 2012 17:31:03 +0100, Stephen Wolstenholme
wrote:

This is a general system performance problem with many possible
causes.
http://speedmaxpc.com/speed/booster/...FYwQfAodbGMDVw
does a good clean up but it's not free!

How is that thing not snake oil?

--

Char Jackson

Even most of the buyers think it is!
http://www.reviewopedia.com/speedmaxpc-reviews

Chris

Antares 531 wrote:
I frequently get the error message, "Program Not Responding" when I
try to save a file I'm working on, or close the program. This happens
frequently but not always. That is, about half of the time I do this
everything works as it should.

When the file save operation hangs up, if I just wait a minute or so
the program will start responding and the file will be saved, then all
goes well for a while. This is happening in all of my client software,
not just one specific program.

This is a home built computer with an ASUS P7P55D Motherboard, running
Windows 7, 64 bit Home Premium.

Memory 3.99 GB
Processor Intel Core i7

This computer has three hard drives, C, D & F. C is used for the
client software, D is used for the work files and F is used for
automated backups. Each of these drives is a Western Digital 565 GB
and they each show about 2/3 of the drive as unused space.

I certainly would appreciate any suggestions. I've tried updating all
my drivers with Driver Detective. I've also checked for on-line
updates for my OS and client software. All seem to be up to date.

Gordon

When you go to interact with the file system, and open a file dialog
box, the computer may check "well, how many file systems do I have"
and it attempts to "stat" or check the health of each one.

It could be, that a share, or some other kind of transient file system
object has gone missing, and the system is looking for it. In an
attempt to debug the problem, I'd check whether the machine had been
used to "connect to work", use a share somewhere, and that share
was gone.

Or, check how many "custom" file system objects have been installed.
For example, a "virtual CD drive" software, which mounts ISO files
and pretends they're a CD drive, is a file system object. Some of
those have weird behaviors in corner cases.

Generally speaking, as time goes on, fewer and fewer things in
Windows "run synchronous and block". Much of the OS is asynchronous,
and that helps prevent Windows from becoming jammed up. And what
that means in practice, is to as much an extent as possible,
the system should never "stall in the kernel". The kernel should
return calls from application programs, in a timely manner, without
preventing other kernel calls from being handled.

To give an example of a violation of this principle, look back at
Windows 98 and the networking stack. I had quite a few examples
there, where I could be doing something network related, and
the system would freeze up temporarily. And it's because some
network code would "block" and wait for a result, and something
would eventually time out, and release the system back to me.
While blocked, the computer would be virtually useless.

It's pretty hard for the software designers, to remove all cases
of that. They work on them as they find them, and sometimes
the problems disappear, because the entire architecture has
been redone from top to bottom. (In the case of vista,
that "redo" caused more problems than it solved. Windows 7
allowed some time to pass, for cleanup.)

*******

There have been cases, where the "jam up" thing was constant.
There was one chipset (possibly by SIS), where if you attempted
to do any operation on a disk drive, there was a five second
delay. Nothing would happen. Task Manager would not be "busy"
and no cycles were wasted. It was like some portion of the
driver for the disk, simply didn't receive the command. After
five seconds, the lost command would time out, and some layer
of the storage stack would "retry" the operation, and it would
always succeed. I never did hear back from anyone affected,
whether that ever got fixed. That's a bug, somewhere between
OS and driver, and can be really annoying, because any attempt
to access a disk, is met with a guaranteed five second delay,
before the disk hears of the command. I've never experienced
that here, but can imagine that would be annoying.

If you're the kind of person, that "installs a new program
every day", tries every piece of cruft imaginable (I used
to do that with my Macintosh computer :-) ), then there
are bound to be the odd side effect from doing so. Normally
we'd say to "simply your setup" or eliminate what we'd
call "suspicious things". For example, if you saw nothing
but bad comments about Norton GoBack, and you had a copy,
you might focus on that. Your file system, differs from
ours in some way, and the trick is figuring out, how
it differs. You've added something to your system,
that we're not using.

*******

Let's take a hypothetical case. I have a Windows 7 laptop.
Say I started having your problem. How would I attack it ?

One test case I'd try would be:

1) Image the system to an external drive. An exact copy,
so the problem situation can be restored in step (4).
2) Do a "factory reset" using the Acer OEM restore partition
that came with the laptop.
3) Install some client program that used to have a problem.
Test whether the delay/freeze is there.
4) (Restore the image when you're finished testing, to bring
the system back to where it was.)

That's an example of simplifying the system, and it removes
everything suspicious. If that test case fails (problem
still present), it could be a hardware problem, such as
a failing disk drive.

Examples of softwares, that might run synchronous with user
activity, would be AV software (scanning the same file you're
trying to work on), perhaps System Restore (making a backup
copy of something). It could be some program like that, which
is responsible. If you have a boatload of anti-malware
programs, perhaps they're all "piling on" when you do a
file system operation.

Paul

On 10/06/2012 11:14 AM, Antares 531 wrote:
I frequently get the error message, "Program Not Responding" when I
try to save a file I'm working on, or close the program. This happens
frequently but not always. That is, about half of the time I do this
everything works as it should.
[etc]

Which programs? I've found it happens here occasionally, too, always
with 32-bit programs from a 3rd party.

--
Wolf K.

On Sun, 10 Jun 2012 16:38:22 -0400, "Chris S."
wrote:


"Char Jackson" wrote in message
.. .
On Sun, 10 Jun 2012 17:31:03 +0100, Stephen Wolstenholme
wrote:

This is a general system performance problem with many possible
causes.
http://speedmaxpc.com/speed/booster/...FYwQfAodbGMDVw
does a good clean up but it's not free!

How is that thing not snake oil?

--

Char Jackson

Even most of the buyers think it is!
http://www.reviewopedia.com/speedmaxpc-reviews

Yikes, but pretty much what I expected.

--

Char Jackson

On Sun, 10 Jun 2012 10:35:30 -0500, Antares 531
wrote:

On Sun, 10 Jun 2012 08:28:44 -0700, Evan Platt
wrote:

On Sun, 10 Jun 2012 10:14:58 -0500, Antares 531
wrote:

I frequently get the error message, "Program Not Responding" when I
try to save a file I'm working on, or close the program. This happens
frequently but not always. That is, about half of the time I do this
everything works as it should.

When the file save operation hangs up, if I just wait a minute or so
the program will start responding and the file will be saved, then all
goes well for a while. This is happening in all of my client software,
not just one specific program.

This is a home built computer with an ASUS P7P55D Motherboard, running
Windows 7, 64 bit Home Premium.

Memory 3.99 GB
Processor Intel Core i7

This computer has three hard drives, C, D & F. C is used for the
client software, D is used for the work files and F is used for
automated backups. Each of these drives is a Western Digital 565 GB
and they each show about 2/3 of the drive as unused space.

I certainly would appreciate any suggestions. I've tried updating all
my drivers with Driver Detective. I've also checked for on-line
updates for my OS and client software. All seem to be up to date.

No, don't mention the program name or anything.

Have you tried updating or removing and reinstalling whatever this
mystery program is?

This happens with all my programs. I use MS Office and a few other
client software programs, but they all have the same problem when I
try to save a file that has been modified or just created. Gordon

Are you saving big files?
I have that situation when I am opening or closing 17 Mb MS Excel
files.

DJT

On Mon, 11 Jun 2012 07:09:52 +1000, DJT wrote:

On Sun, 10 Jun 2012 10:35:30 -0500, Antares 531
wrote:

On Sun, 10 Jun 2012 08:28:44 -0700, Evan Platt
wrote:

On Sun, 10 Jun 2012 10:14:58 -0500, Antares 531
wrote:

I frequently get the error message, "Program Not Responding" when I
try to save a file I'm working on, or close the program. This happens
frequently but not always. That is, about half of the time I do this
everything works as it should.

When the file save operation hangs up, if I just wait a minute or so
the program will start responding and the file will be saved, then all
goes well for a while. This is happening in all of my client software,
not just one specific program.

This is a home built computer with an ASUS P7P55D Motherboard, running
Windows 7, 64 bit Home Premium.

Memory 3.99 GB
Processor Intel Core i7

This computer has three hard drives, C, D & F. C is used for the
client software, D is used for the work files and F is used for
automated backups. Each of these drives is a Western Digital 565 GB
and they each show about 2/3 of the drive as unused space.

I certainly would appreciate any suggestions. I've tried updating all
my drivers with Driver Detective. I've also checked for on-line
updates for my OS and client software. All seem to be up to date.

No, don't mention the program name or anything.

Have you tried updating or removing and reinstalling whatever this
mystery program is?

This happens with all my programs. I use MS Office and a few other
client software programs, but they all have the same problem when I
try to save a file that has been modified or just created. Gordon

Are you saving big files?
I have that situation when I am opening or closing 17 Mb MS Excel
files.

DJT

I've been tinkering around with all the information that you and
others have provided but still can't find any firm answers. Some of my
files are quite small and some are larger, but I don't have any HUGE
files that I've encountered this problem with.

I'm beginning to think my computer problem may be somehow caused by
the automatic backups to the third hard drive. If this keeps kicking
in to do a backup just before I try to save the copy of a file I've
been working on it may force a wait until the backup process is
completed. I can't see any drive light activity that would confirm
that a backup is in progress but I can't think of anything else that
might be at the root of this problem. Gordon

On Sun, 10 Jun 2012 17:09:22 -0400, Wolf K
wrote:

On 10/06/2012 11:14 AM, Antares 531 wrote:
I frequently get the error message, "Program Not Responding" when I
try to save a file I'm working on, or close the program. This happens
frequently but not always. That is, about half of the time I do this
everything works as it should.
[etc]

Which programs? I've found it happens here occasionally, too, always
with 32-bit programs from a 3rd party.

MS Word, Excel, Internet Explorer, Agent Newsreader....

Gordon

On Sun, 10 Jun 2012 16:56:43 -0400, Paul wrote:

Antares 531 wrote:
I frequently get the error message, "Program Not Responding" when I
try to save a file I'm working on, or close the program. This happens
frequently but not always. That is, about half of the time I do this
everything works as it should.

When the file save operation hangs up, if I just wait a minute or so
the program will start responding and the file will be saved, then all
goes well for a while. This is happening in all of my client software,
not just one specific program.

This is a home built computer with an ASUS P7P55D Motherboard, running
Windows 7, 64 bit Home Premium.

Memory 3.99 GB
Processor Intel Core i7

This computer has three hard drives, C, D & F. C is used for the
client software, D is used for the work files and F is used for
automated backups. Each of these drives is a Western Digital 565 GB
and they each show about 2/3 of the drive as unused space.

I certainly would appreciate any suggestions. I've tried updating all
my drivers with Driver Detective. I've also checked for on-line
updates for my OS and client software. All seem to be up to date.

Gordon

When you go to interact with the file system, and open a file dialog
box, the computer may check "well, how many file systems do I have"
and it attempts to "stat" or check the health of each one.

It could be, that a share, or some other kind of transient file system
object has gone missing, and the system is looking for it. In an
attempt to debug the problem, I'd check whether the machine had been
used to "connect to work", use a share somewhere, and that share
was gone.

This may be the source of the problem. I did have my old computer
hooked up through the household network such that it could share files
back and forth with my new computer but I have the old computer off
line most of the time, now. Maybe the new computer file sharing system
is still looking for the old computer's files.

Or, check how many "custom" file system objects have been installed.
For example, a "virtual CD drive" software, which mounts ISO files
and pretends they're a CD drive, is a file system object. Some of
those have weird behaviors in corner cases.

Generally speaking, as time goes on, fewer and fewer things in
Windows "run synchronous and block". Much of the OS is asynchronous,
and that helps prevent Windows from becoming jammed up. And what
that means in practice, is to as much an extent as possible,
the system should never "stall in the kernel". The kernel should
return calls from application programs, in a timely manner, without
preventing other kernel calls from being handled.

To give an example of a violation of this principle, look back at
Windows 98 and the networking stack. I had quite a few examples
there, where I could be doing something network related, and
the system would freeze up temporarily. And it's because some
network code would "block" and wait for a result, and something
would eventually time out, and release the system back to me.
While blocked, the computer would be virtually useless.

This seems pretty much like the problem I'm having.

It's pretty hard for the software designers, to remove all cases
of that. They work on them as they find them, and sometimes
the problems disappear, because the entire architecture has
been redone from top to bottom. (In the case of vista,
that "redo" caused more problems than it solved. Windows 7
allowed some time to pass, for cleanup.)

*******

There have been cases, where the "jam up" thing was constant.
There was one chipset (possibly by SIS), where if you attempted
to do any operation on a disk drive, there was a five second
delay. Nothing would happen. Task Manager would not be "busy"
and no cycles were wasted. It was like some portion of the
driver for the disk, simply didn't receive the command. After
five seconds, the lost command would time out, and some layer
of the storage stack would "retry" the operation, and it would
always succeed. I never did hear back from anyone affected,
whether that ever got fixed. That's a bug, somewhere between
OS and driver, and can be really annoying, because any attempt
to access a disk, is met with a guaranteed five second delay,
before the disk hears of the command. I've never experienced
that here, but can imagine that would be annoying.

If you're the kind of person, that "installs a new program
every day", tries every piece of cruft imaginable (I used
to do that with my Macintosh computer :-) ), then there
are bound to be the odd side effect from doing so. Normally
we'd say to "simply your setup" or eliminate what we'd
call "suspicious things". For example, if you saw nothing
but bad comments about Norton GoBack, and you had a copy,
you might focus on that. Your file system, differs from
ours in some way, and the trick is figuring out, how
it differs. You've added something to your system,
that we're not using.

*******

Let's take a hypothetical case. I have a Windows 7 laptop.
Say I started having your problem. How would I attack it ?

One test case I'd try would be:

1) Image the system to an external drive. An exact copy,
so the problem situation can be restored in step (4).
2) Do a "factory reset" using the Acer OEM restore partition
that came with the laptop.
3) Install some client program that used to have a problem.
Test whether the delay/freeze is there.
4) (Restore the image when you're finished testing, to bring
the system back to where it was.)

That's an example of simplifying the system, and it removes
everything suspicious. If that test case fails (problem
still present), it could be a hardware problem, such as
a failing disk drive.

I've wondered if my drive D: (working files) could be failing but I
ran a scan disk check and found no problems.

Examples of softwares, that might run synchronous with user
activity, would be AV software (scanning the same file you're
trying to work on), perhaps System Restore (making a backup
copy of something). It could be some program like that, which
is responsible. If you have a boatload of anti-malware
programs, perhaps they're all "piling on" when you do a
file system operation.

Paul

I use Driver Detective and MS Security Essentials. Could either of
these be causing this kind of conflict? Gordon

"Antares 531" wrote in message
news
I frequently get the error message, "Program Not Responding" when I
try to save a file I'm working on, or close the program. This happens
frequently but not always. That is, about half of the time I do this
everything works as it should.

When the file save operation hangs up, if I just wait a minute or so
the program will start responding and the file will be saved, then all
goes well for a while. This is happening in all of my client software,
not just one specific program.

This is a home built computer with an ASUS P7P55D Motherboard, running
Windows 7, 64 bit Home Premium.

Memory 3.99 GB
Processor Intel Core i7

This computer has three hard drives, C, D & F. C is used for the
client software, D is used for the work files and F is used for
automated backups. Each of these drives is a Western Digital 565 GB
and they each show about 2/3 of the drive as unused space.

I certainly would appreciate any suggestions. I've tried updating all
my drivers with Driver Detective. I've also checked for on-line
updates for my OS and client software. All seem to be up to date.

Gordon

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I get the same thing every time I open Internet Explorer or Windows Live
Mail. Doesn't happen with any other programs, just those two that came with
the installed version of Windows. Firefox starts and runs correctly. Always
done it since I bought the computer. They both hang for up to a minute,
then all's OK. Never happens on 2nd opening, just the first after switching
on. Checked the resource manager several times, and nothing is hogging. Now,
I just fire them up and go and get a cup of coffee while they're messing
around.

OS Name Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium
Version 6.1.7601 Service Pack 1 Build 7601
Other OS Description Not Available
OS Manufacturer Microsoft Corporation
System Name ***************
System Manufacturer Hewlett-Packard
System Model G5105uk
System Type x64-based PC
Processor AMD Athlon(tm) II X3 440 Processor, 3000 Mhz, 3 Core(s), 3
Logical Processor(s)
BIOS Version/Date American Megatrends Inc. 6.10, 02/07/2010
Installed Physical Memory (RAM) 3.00 GB
Total Physical Memory 2.75 GB
Available Physical Memory 1.27 GB
Total Virtual Memory 5.50 GB
Available Virtual Memory 3.38 GB
Page File Space 2.75 GB