For the last month or so, XP is locking up on me. Well, it's sort of locking up because any application that is running when it occurs continues to run but I can't start anything else and I can't get a response when I click on anything for several minutes before the system fires up again. I'm running XP Pro, SP3 (all up-to-date). My gut feeling tells me that this is not malware, etc., but, of course, there is always that possibility. My AV is Avast!. I also have Spypot S&D (with immunization on), Spyware Blaster, Ad-Aware, SuperAnti-Spyware, and I run Windows Live Online every couple of weeks. And to clean things up, I run CCleaner every day. I keep junk off my PC and only have necessary services running. Some of those programs are running in real-time and the others I run about once a week. They always come up clean except for a couple low-threat tracking cookies now and then. I also ran a couple free online scanners (Trend, Panda, etc.) two days ago to see if they might help. No luck. I also ran Cleanup, Defrag, and ChkDsk. (Note: I also did a System Restore to a point before the problem began with, also with no luck. I'm adding this note because Makai asked about it below). Oh... almost forgot! I can open Task Manager when the problem is occuring and no unusual CPU usuage or anything like that shows up.
Event View shows the following error: "The server {00024500-0000-0000-C000-000000000046} did not register with DCOM within the required timeout."
I have searched the Internet before coming here and didn't find anything that I could understand. I searched the registers and found that this apparently has something to do with Excel, an application that I have but almost never use. I don't understand some of the information I found because it was too complicated for this dummy.
I would really appreciate any help anyone might offer but I would also appreciate it you keep it in plain English as much as possible.
This problem is becoming an annoyance. (BTW, nobody at Annoyances.org had a suggestion.) The system usually pops back up after several minutes but, on some occasions, I have to re-boot. It happens, on average, several times a day. I haven't added any software lately except SpyderElite3. However, I believe I started experiencing the problem before I installed that software but I thought I would mention it anyway.
Thanks
Edited by ZoneIII, 22 March 2009 - 04:15 PM.