Help. XP system running out of resources.

[elkinm]

I am having an unusual and hard out of resources scenario. When it happens, I cannot see icons or text correctly and in a gui pieces are entirely missing. Also I cannot launch most applications with a: this is not a valid win32 application error.
Restarting the PC fixes the problem but only for a short time. Also, when I restart, the restart prompt shows the 3 buttons, but the blue background is transparent as it cannot display it.

I noticed that running a drive search for a file is the fasters and easiest way to trigger this. It can be any drive and it will reach the out of resources state in several minutes.

I have uninstalled or disabled any monitoring software I had as well as my antivirus, avira free edition 2010 but is still happens.

I tried a basic drivers and services boot and it still happens.

I reinstalled chipset drivers, my hard drives, checked and moved my ram, and in all cases I cannot find any problems, but the problem still occurs.

I disabled ntfs last access update, 8.3 name creation and other ntfs tweaks and I have disabled zip and cab file support to see if that helped. The problem still occurs, it may take slightly longer to start.

I can use the PC normally for a day or a few as, long as I don't search, which used be weeks before.

I have not made any changes that I know of to correlate which this happening.

I am running out of ideas, and would love to find out a way to find the resource hog and fix it.

Thanks

 

[elkinm]

Also, my subsystem session memory is set to 12 mb already.
Max GDI count is set to 15000 and max user handles is at 18000.

 

[Emulex]

turn off indexing on the drive.
get rid of microsoft search 4.0
disable indexing service
chkdsk

should be good to go.

 

[elkinm]

All done,

I never used the indexing service and had it off all along.
I also have the allow indexing checkbox disabled for all drives.
I made sure to never install search 4.0 on my own system.
When I tried the basic startup, all drivers and services were disabled even Plug and Play and it still happened.

I ran checkdisk several times on all my drives and found no errors. I did noticed that at the start of stage 2, verifying indexes it stayed at 0 for a long time and then continues normally? Is there a way of re-building or resetting these indexes?

Thanks again.

 

[BoberFett]

I have very recently started having this exact same problem. I've been running this box for years, months at a time without a reboot. Starting a couple weeks ago I started having resource issues and now have to reboot every couple of days.

My symptoms are very similar. The icons on the desktop have seemingly random text. Window backgrounds don't appear, I can't launch programs, etc. At this point, I usually can't even bring up task manager or the Shut Down window. I can close down everything in the tray which gives me enough resources to shut it down without a hard reset, but that's about it.

I wonder if there was a bad XP update recently?

 

[VirtualLarry]

I wonder if there was a bad XP update recently?

Yeah, it was the MS "EOL, time to upgrade" update, that makes perfectly fine working older OSes crap out badly and force users to upgrade. How else do you think MS makes their money.

 

[elkinm]

Wow BoberFett, that is exactly the same as my issue. I also sometimes have to use task manager to restart and hard reset when that fails.

Just wondering, have you been able to trigger the situation very quickly like with a full disk search?

Is there any program or way to monitor system resources like the session memory? Task manager and process explorer have handle and GDI counts, but those are never to high. I feel extremely powerless whenever I have out of resources problems?

 

[ModestGamer]

disable remote registry

run

services.msc

 

[bruceb]

My old XP on a Dell 8200 was doing the same thing, especially when trying to immunize with Spybot SD .. I just finished doing a clean reinstall of the entire OS and my apps, SP3 included, but have not yet went online for the latest MS updates. So maybe it is an update causing all the trouble. Whatever it was, it was also causing my Webshots Albums to get damaged. I have uninstalled Webshots for now.

 

[BoberFett]

I took Emulex's suggestion and turned off indexing. I also uninstalled MS Dev Studio including SQL Server Express which has been running unused for a long time. We'll see how that goes.

At a fresh boot, the only things I have running are

Gmail Notifier
Avira Antivir (free version)
Daemon Tools
OpenOffice quickstarter
Peerblock
uTorrent

There are a couple of additional hardware/printer related things in my process list, but nothing there that has been updated recently.

I'm going to give it a few days and see what happens.

 

[elkinm]

What about your services. I used msconfig to try a basic start as I mentioned earlier, but the problem happened and it actually lost the configs so it could not automatically re-enable the services it turned off.

I am running in normal, but I had to manually re-enable all services other than RPC, DCOM I think.

Now I have:
RPC,
DCOM,
DHCP Client
PNP,
Print Spooler,
Windows Audio,
NVIDIA Driver Service,
Avira Services.
Automatic Updates (incase there is a useful update for this)
Background non-intelligent transfer.

This is the basic service set with which my PC runs fine, but the resource problem still happens. All other services and programs are disabled.

 

[kalest]

I had same problem, after scrubbing my hard drive & reinstalling only to find it was still there.

Turned out it was Avira Antivirus (free) ver 10 with severe memory leaks.

Check out http://forum.avira.com/wbb/index.php?page=Thread&postID=1020322

There are lots of posts in the avira forum on this topic.

It was the transparent 'turn off computer' that gave it away.

Hope this helps

 

[RebateMonger]

Turned out it was Avira Antivirus (free) ver 10 with severe memory leaks.

Nice first post. Thanks. I see that a couple of posters in this thread are running Avira.

 

[bruceb]

Now that it was brought up, I was using Avira Free on that machine (and on my Toshiba Laptop). But I will be installing McAfee 8.5i Corporate as my brother gets it from his office. They encourage workers to use it on their home computers so as to minimize possible infections at work from files worked on at home or by remote login.

 

[pcslookout]

I had same problem, after scrubbing my hard drive & reinstalling only to find it was still there.

Turned out it was Avira Antivirus (free) ver 10 with severe memory leaks.

Check out http://forum.avira.com/wbb/index.php?page=Thread&postID=1020322

There are lots of posts in the avira forum on this topic.

It was the transparent 'turn off computer' that gave it away.

Hope this helps

Really? Glad I don't use Avira anymore. I still like it though but can't stand programs that have memory leaks. If you think that is bad I absolutly hate Roboform because it been causing me problems for so long and didn't even realize it. Has a memory leak as well it seems unfortunately. Even though it may be free you won't see me using it anymore. They are lagging behind bad. It is uncalled for how much Roboform lags and slows down Firefox. It should not happen. Oh well. Use to be so good. Good thing it is free. Thankfully there is plenty of alternatives out there.

 

[lxskllr]

Now that it was brought up, I was using Avira Free on that machine (and on my Toshiba Laptop). But I will be installing McAfee 8.5i Corporate as my brother gets it from his office. They encourage workers to use it on their home computers so as to minimize possible infections at work from files worked on at home or by remote login.

I don't know about McAfee. You couldn't pay me to use that. I haven't had any issues with Avira, but I'm not on XP. If I wanted to change, I'd go to MSE or Avast. I'd also consider Norton if it were free. I can get Norton through Comcast, but I'm happy with Avira.

 

[bruceb]

Well, it is a Corporate edition as used by BAE Aerospace Systems (US Gov't contractor) so I am fairly certain they do not consider it junk. As to Avira, what was described here and at the Avira forums, seem to be indicative of the same problems I had on both computers. For all I know, that may also have caused my Webshots Albums to get corrupted. I thought I was dealing with some virus, so I refomatted and reinstalled my OS (XP Pro) on my Dell 8200 .. not quite ready to put it online as yet.

 

[lxskllr]

I think McAfee is popular in the corporate arena due to good central management options. That's going by hearsay, and not personal experience. My experience with the stand alone product wasn't very positive. It ranked up there with the Norton of a few years ago(bloated junk).

 

[kalest]

Just to clarify a little, elkinm is using Avira Antivirus 10 & said

"I cannot see icons or text correctly and in a gui pieces are entirely missing"

"Also, when I restart, the restart prompt shows the 3 buttons, but the blue background is transparent as it cannot display it"

I was getting exactly the same problems, after some time you get missing menu text & icons plus other GUI text. When this happens applications, including Windows Task Manager fail to start. When shutting down the 'turn off computer' window is transparent. A power down/up sorts it for a while.

It is caused by the latest Avira Antivirus (free).

 

[elkinm]

Just to clarify a little, elkinm is using Avira Antivirus 10 & said

"I cannot see icons or text correctly and in a gui pieces are entirely missing"

"Also, when I restart, the restart prompt shows the 3 buttons, but the blue background is transparent as it cannot display it"

I was getting exactly the same problems, after some time you get missing menu text & icons plus other GUI text. When this happens applications, including Windows Task Manager fail to start. When shutting down the 'turn off computer' window is transparent. A power down/up sorts it for a while.

It is caused by the latest Avira Antivirus (free).

It is possible that AVIRA is the cause and I did notice a AVIRA update as it shut down and restarted sometime in the last several week window before this issue started.

However, earlier, I completely uninstalled Avira antivirus and started in the minimal configuration and searching my hard drives still resulted in the same problem after a few minutes.

Is it possible that AVIRA left some traces on my PC at the disk level and still having some effect as everything that could be off was off? Could it also be windows related and gets worse with number of files opened or accessed. Guard scans many filed search does not scan but looks at many files and directories.

I will try AVIRA 9.0, which I should still have, but I don't see why it would be if it is uninstalled.

Thanks again.

 

[kalest]

I'm surprised at that, since your symptoms appeared to be same as mine. All I can say is I've uninstalled Avira and moved over to AVG and haven't had any problems since, fingers crossed.

Can't see how Avira could still be your problem once you uninstalled it.

Do an advanced search on http://forum.avira.com, search for 'memory leak' this month. There now are about 40 threads on the topic that may help identify if that is your problem.

Good luck.

 

[Fardringle]

Interesting. I have Avira 10 (free version) installed on about 40 different computers - mine, and friends/family - and none of them have any problems with memory leaks. Maybe there's a specific system configuration that causes it?

 

[elkinm]

Avira 10 is uninstalled once again and now I am waiting to see if I can re-create it again before going to 9.

I am more interested as to why a disk search can cause the problem so quickly?

I have another PC with 10 and also installed it for several friends/relatives without issue as far as I know.

Could there be some bad interaction with certain disk volumes or controllers?

 

[kalest]

Fardringle/elkinm,

I have not verified this, but I have read somewhere that it may only be Windows XP SP3 that the problem occurs on, which may be why some people don't see the problem.

 

[bruceb]

Nice theory, but most people have been on XP SP3 for well over a year now. In my view, the problem is not SP3, but a coding error by the folks at Avira. They say a definite solution should be out early Dec