XP freezing when menu tabs drop down Safari IE Office and others

[Discovery]

Hi - I put a new hard drive and installed a clean 32 bit XP with SP3 about six weeks ago. Machine has 4GB of RAM with 4GB page file and 750 GB drive.

Almost always when I use a drop down from a menu bar, the mouse and KB freeze. I have a closed on the screen counting seconds and that freezes also. I have a background program writing to disk and the disk light keeps flickering so it seems the CPU is not frozen (but, of course, not sure about that).

It took e a while to narrow it down to the menu drop down, but I believe that that causes the problem.

It does not seem to matter if it is IE or Safari or MS Word or Excel or some other program. I changed the mouse and the keyboard. Problem persists.

I performed an AVG scan and there is not identified virus. I performed an SFC and the problem sill persists. (BTW, if the SFC supposed to give some report? I have not gotten a report but it did run on the restart. I saw that message.)

Any help or suggestions would be appreciated.

 

[Chicano]

No I've never seen a report from SFC Scannow...

1. How many third party programs do you have running at startup? check Start \ Run \ type: "msconfig" (w/o quotes) and hit Enter. Go to the Startup tab \ and uncheck every program you don't need starting up with Windows.

2. Next download CCleaner to remove old temp files and other leftovers that use-up disc space and make windows slower.
3. Next go to C:\Properties\Tools\ and tun the Disk error checkup application. it may propmpt for a startup scan so close your applications and restart the computer,
4. and next run the Disc defragmenter application also in the C Properties Tools.
5. The only thing left is to check the DMA mode in the device manager \ IDE main Channel \ Properties \ Advanced Settings http://www.onthegosoft.com/dma_setting_nt.htm If the DMA Mode is low or disabled, use the DMACHECK application to enable it.

Download DMACKECK.EXE
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/191774