Control Panel "Not Responding"
 

When I go into my control panel for primarily performance and maintenance it freezes and comes back with "not responding".

I was told this meant I may have a corrupt registry file, so I got Norton Systemworks and tried that. Nada.

So I have tried reloading Windows XP, and still nothing....

What is doing this and how can I solve the problem?

OS XP SP2

So you did re-install Windows and the same thing keeps happening? Did you format your hard disk before re-installing? If you have a way to back up all your data then format your hard disk and do a fresh Windows install, then before you install the service packs check the Control Panel and see if it's a service pack problem.

Also check your disk's fragmentation levels, do a defrag and a disk cleanup. Have you got any new devices attached, like a new printer or a scanner, network card, USB peripherals? Unplug everything that isn't necessary and see if it helps, then attach them one by one to perhaps narrow it down to a faulty device.

Seems like a lot of effort, I know, but it's better than forking out the money for a new hard disk if you don't need to. Keep us updated though!

Well, I tried Norton and I had a lot of repairs to make the first run.

but I was still getting a slow performance and "not responding" on everything. so I decided to reload XP.

I erased SP2 and when reloading XP I got something saying that one of my games was hindering the progress. I erased the game and tried again..... it did this numerous times and all the games were EA games. So I erased all my EA games and XP reloaded fine.

The computer is still running slow but I took care of the "not responding" messages. I have a feeling the "Gamespy" that is in EA Games was causing some problems....

Anyway, I'm hoping I truly fixed the problem and didn't just band-aid it and it will happen again. I am debating as to whether or not I should reload any of my EA games again though.

Thanks for the help Rlyss.

sounds like one heck of a problem

I had a similar problem on a compter and it had so much spyware on it the machine simply bagan to crawl. Have to tried lookaing at that or running an online virus scan?

well I have been running McAffee, E-Trust and Search and Destroy before all this happened and I have since added Norton Systemworks.

But I do believe that the way this is acting it has to be multiple virus and adware infections. It seems like it's ok and then all of a sudden it slows way down and I hit task manager and it's showing that the windows open are not responding but the CPU Usage is 100% and then 0. I maybe wrong but it does seem something is spiking the usage.

So I'm going to hit a few of the sites that have been talked about here and see what Hijackthis and such can do for me.

I also recommend giving the new Microsoft tool a try. In combo with AdAware, Spybot and McAfee AV it helped me kill a nasy problem.

Also - check if you have any processes running (using Task Manager) that are consuming lots of CPU - if this is happening, try to look at where that program comes from and see if you can stop it running - I have an HP printer and found one of the programs that comes with it (statusclient.exe) was chewing up my cpus - I just stopped it running and everything was sweet again.

Well, it is back up to speed but as for the control panel it won't let me do anything saying I need to contact my system administrator...... I am my systems administrator for God's sake..... lol


Now how do I go about working and correcting this?

Don't run E-Trust and Norton, or other virus detecting products together, they don't particularly get along with each other. I don't know if that's causing your slowdown problems, but I do know though those programs tend to interfere with each other.

Define "reload". That's not a typical PC term.

Restart in safe mode. Run your anti-virus software, Ad-Aware, and Spybot, then restart in the normal mode.
Click "run" in the start menu and type in "msconfig"
Go to startup items and uncheck any programs that are scheduled to run on each boot that look suspicious or you do not need.

Any updates for us? I'm curious about whether any of the advice here has helped, it's all been great advice so far.

Personally I come from the 'a format and a nice fresh install' can never hurt school of thought. If none of these have helped I'd look into doing that. Instead of just re-installing Windows, actually format the disk and do a fresh install.

Thank you, BoCo.

tis one of my little peeves.

ps - +1 to what Rlyss said - format c: and install windows. a fresh and clean system never hurt anyone ;)