taskbar

Hello! I am runing Windoes XP, and I got a problem with my taskbar, what it does - is it freezes, what i mean is that i cant click on anything in taskbar, when i close all of the windows they still show up in the taskbar as if the windows are still open, i try to click on them - nothing happens, i click on the start button, again nothing happens... Then 30seconds later everything starts flashing and opening, i.e. everything i clicked in the taskbar starts to open... this does not happen often, maybe once or twise in 24hours, but still it is very annoying!
Before that i had other problem, on the startup i could not start my explorer, every other program would start, but i would have to wait for a 1min or two until i could load the exploere... Weird stuff...

Try accessing your Task manager by pressing CTRL-ALT-DEL, click on the Processes tab, and take a screenshot of what you have running. It could be some program you have that causes everything to lock up like that.

Also, what are your system specs?

Yakbak said:

Try accessing your Task manager by pressing CTRL-ALT-DEL, click on the Processes tab, and take a screenshot of what you have running. It could be some program you have that causes everything to lock up like that.
Also, what are your system specs?

Click to expand...

Screen shot:
System specs: Athlon XP 1800+ with Volcano 7, Asus A7A 266 motherboard, 2x256MB DDR-RAM 2100, 30GB HDD 7200RPM, 20GB HDD 7200RPM (both HDD are maxtor), RADEON 8500 64MB DDR video, 12x8x32x LG RW-ROM, 8x LG DVD-ROM

Your processes look alright.

When your comptuer and taskbar gets slowed down, do you notice your hard drive grinds a lot before or during the time of the freeze?

I kinda get this problem when I play Earth and Beyond for a few hours (it's known to have a memory leak), and after I exit, everything is all slow for a few minutes.

With 512MB, things should be running smooth, I'm not sure why it freezes. You could try updating your system drivers to the latest, running Windows Update, etc.

That's Windows for ya!!!! Try properly restarting a few times, and checking what processes you are running. Windows always does crap like this because it's so freaking stupid

Ok it happened again! What happened is just as i described, it froze and i could not do anything, but it happened right after i closed all of the programs that i was running - Photoshop 7, 3D Max, Maya, and ie explorer. I am a graphics designer, so i run all of those together because i need all of them together, just as soon as i close all of them - the taskbar freezes... My desktop is fine, i can open My Coputer, and i can start any program, but the taskbar doesn't, hmmmm, refresh!?

I'm pretty sure that's because you've run out of RAM for Windows, so it takes a few minutes to recover it from the programs you were using.

I'd suggest getting more RAM, as that will help a lot for those types of graphics programs.

You can try setting your virtual swap file to 1.5 times the amount of RAM you have (512 x 1.5 = 768MB swap file), that may help a bit.