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Weird Win 7 black start menu/unable to open items

M

Maverickbcp

Member
I have never seen this before. My system will be running fine and then all of a sudden I can't navigate through any of my open Windows Explorer windows. I'll try to open any of the files of navigate the folders to no avail. I'll then try launching something from the desktop/quick launch and it won't respond. When I open the start menu the right hand side under my profile picture has changed from a translucent blue to dark black and none of my clicks are registered. I try to open up task manager and nothing happens. I can restart and everything goes back to normal. Ever seen this?
 
I have, trying to remember the circumstances around it.

Desktop or laptop?
Anything special for a video card?
Has this occurred more than once?
What are your temperatures like when this happens?
Have you performed a virus/malware scan lately?
 
It has happened more than once...haven't found any malware or viruses...currently running an R9 290 at stock settings water cooled. Can't check temps when this occurs as I lose the ability to run any apps. Has occurred in the middle of the day and night. Temps otherwise have been nowhere near any dangerous levels as it's water cooled. Didn't have this issue for over 6 months after system was built.

I'll look into the GDI objects.
 
It probably cannot connect to the designated NSA server to upload all your personal information. I say that only half jokingly, in all seriousness it is probably due to a networking timeout.
 
Ya I've ran all the normal tests/checks but nothing seems to pop up. Nothing in event viewer either. Everything will be running fine and then this happens forcing me to manually power cycle the PC as while I can open up the start menu, I can't click anything. I can see everything on the right-hand side of the start menu, it's just the background behind it has turned black. It's very weird and seems to follow no pattern. Different amounts of time between each occurence(days to weeks difference), happened during the night and in the middle of the day, etc.
 
Maverickbcp said:
Ya I've ran all the normal tests/checks but nothing seems to pop up. Nothing in event viewer either. Everything will be running fine and then this happens forcing me to manually power cycle the PC as while I can open up the start menu, I can't click anything. I can see everything on the right-hand side of the start menu, it's just the background behind it has turned black. It's very weird and seems to follow no pattern. Different amounts of time between each occurence(days to weeks difference), happened during the night and in the middle of the day, etc.
Click to expand...

As I've already said, the symptoms are consistent with a resource leak. You're not going to find the answer in the event log or in any standard diagnostic.

Download and run Process Explorer (run it with UAC elevation so that it can show the details for privileged processes as well). Turn on the columns for GDI objects (and you might as well also turn on the columns for USER objects and paged/nonpaged pool). And just keep it running. The next time you run into this problem, look in Process Explorer and see if there's anything unusual with the GDI allocation--if explorer.exe's GDI object count hits 10K (note that there are often 2 different explorer.exe processes--check them both), then you'll see the problems that you see with the Start Menu. Alternatively, this can happen if the total GDI allocation count among all processes hits 65536, so also look out for multiple processes that have counts in the thousands. It's normal to have a few processes that use a few thousand (I normally explorer.exe, wlmail.exe, and firefox.exe using between 1K and 4K each; everything else is under 1K). But anything in the high-thousands, or if there are a lot more than just a few, is unusual.

If explorer.exe is leaking GDI objects and hitting the per-process 10K limit, then it's likely a problem with a shell extension or some other COM object that explorer.exe is loading. If it's due to the exhaustion of system-wide resources, then whatever programs are eating up an inordinate amount are the culprits.

(The reason you should start Process Explorer first and then wait for the problem to happens is that once it happens, you may be unable to launch procexp, so you want procexp ready and available before.)
 
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I used to have that problem (GDI handle leak). Older versions of Firefox were notorious for that. Leave it running for a week or two, or a month, depending on usage, and it would do that. It would allocate a GDI handle for every image it cached, and not free them.
 
VirtualLarry said:
I used to have that problem (GDI handle leak). Older versions of Firefox were notorious for that. Leave it running for a week or two, or a month, depending on usage, and it would do that. It would allocate a GDI handle for every image it cached, and not free them.
Click to expand...

Ya I don't have an older version but I've been leaning towards that as well.

Also to the above poster thank you. I do understand about the leaks. The only thing consistently running during that time is Firefox. It's a hard thing to test for as it's usually weeks in between each occurrence. Can't launch/navigate any windows/menu's once it happens to check on anything. Maybe I'll try using another browser for awhile and see if it returns.
 
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Maverickbcp said:
Ya I don't have an older version but I've been leaning towards that as well.

Also to the above poster thank you. I do understand about the leaks. The only thing consistently running during that time is Firefox. It's a hard thing to test for as it's usually weeks in between each occurrence. Can't launch/navigate any windows/menu's once it happens to check on anything. Maybe I'll try using another browser for awhile and see if it returns.
Click to expand...

It's likely that the problem builds up over time until it hits the limit, instead of thousands of handles leaking instantaneously. It's likely a slow-motion train wreck that you can spot long before it actually happens. Just keep procexp running in the background and take a quick look at the handle counts each day. See if you see something strange after a week or so.
 
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