[RESOLVED] What would cause Windows to "stall"?

[Dickster]

My work PC is a Pentium 3 GHz with 3Gb of memory, running Windows 2000 with Service Pack 4. Sometimes when I navigate folders or do a Windows task like opening "My Computer", Windows will stall for many seconds (like 15 - 30) and lock up the desktop. If I have task manager running it doesn't show any unusual CPU activity. This seems to happen randomly but often enough to get very annoying. The IT tech here couldn't find any problems. Changing network connections did not fix it, and no one else on the same network is having any problems. Can anyone suggest some typical causes of this problem?

[SuperSparks]

It sounds like something is hogging the CPU cycles. Right-click the Taskbar and choose Task Manager, then in the Processes tab make sure that CPU & CPU Time columns are selected (View>Select Columns). Click twice on the CPU column header and that will put the process that is using the most CPU cycles at the top. Ignore System Idle Process, a high value for that is a good thing.

[Dickster]

I've seen nothing unusual. CPU never goes above about 10%, and the idle process stays high.

I forgot to mention the problem can also happen when right-clicking a file. There is a long delay before the menu pops up. Then the next time I try it pops up right away like it should.

[Steve_E]

Hey Dickster, I was having the exact same problem with my Windows 2000 server the last couple of weeks. I actually found this forum when I was Googling for help solving the problem!

Anyways, I found the solution to my problem so I thought I would share it with you to maybe help solve yours.

Check your environment variables. Right click My Computer and click Properties. Advanced tab, then click Environment Variables. Go down the list of variables one by one and check to see if there are any variables to non-existent paths. Sometimes Uninstalls don't catch these variables and so they remain. Every time you open My Computer it attempts to validate these paths for some reason.

I had a quite a few invalid variable paths on mine that must have been there for a while. There was also a variable with a UNC path that was invalid (I think that was really the one taking so long).

I hope this helps you like it did me. That was really annoying!

[Dickster]

Steve, thanks so much! I did have several bad paths in my env variables. I deleted them and the hesitation is gone!

Oh, and welcome to Virtual DR!