[JC Denton]

This was an interesting episode (and painfully annoying, in the case of my Neverwinter Nights campaign--4 hours of progress for naught).  My system would, quite literally without any provocation on my part, solidly lock up.  It was an intermittent thing, I thought, and had to do with CPU overheating, I thought, as my room has less than adequate air circulation, especially where I've got the computer currently situated.  'No big deal,' I think.

Well, next day it does it again.  Restart, everything's fine, later that night it freezes again.  Restart, all's peachy.  'Maybe a virus?' I think.  Get Antivir updated, do a scan, nothing.

I almost thought the problem would solve itself.  But, nay, this is Windows we speak of here!

So, not an hour ago, the system freezes.  'Big deal,' I think, 'Restart, go back to normal.'  Except when I restarted it hard-locked upon getting the desktop loaded.  Then I noticed my optical mouse's laser wasn't on.  Very odd, considering it's plugged into one of the motherboard USB ports.  'Hmm...'  Unplug, restart, all's well, plug it in, it's found, works for about five minutes before locking again.  Pissed, and thinking that maybe the mobo ports were failing, I yank it, plug it into the other USB ports, restart, and now the thing had the audacity to hard-lock during bootup!

Grumbling various terms of unmentionable vulgarity, I figure I could remedy the problem by a quick jaunt into Safe Mode.  Well, it almost worked.  The scrolling list of drivers froze on one particular file, "Mvup.dll" or something of the sort, can't quite remember now.  'Damn you bastard.  Time to whip out Knoppix and find a fix for you.'

Only to my consternation did I discover that Knoppix 3.3 doesn't have Winmodem support bundled in.

So, I throw my arms up in disgust, dig around, find the PS/2 adapter for the mouse, plug it into that, and amazingly, the system works.  I'm almost happy.

So, fast forward to now, and I'm sitting here wondering what the hell happened, why the hell it happened, and what the hell I can do to keep it from happening again.

Ideas?

[JC Denton]

Well, just my bloody luck, turns out the USB mouse is only a minor side effect.

Apparently, whatever's locking things up is related to that infernal preview pane in explorer.  Y'know, where windows thinks it's doing a favor by parsing video files and stuff for the first frame and displaying it, like a good little puppy it is...I pick a single video file, and it never fails to lock things up.

I knew getting WMP was a bad idea...

*ahem*  Er, anyways, anyone got any suggestions on disabling that sideframe?   I think it was tied to some system service, but I can't recall which one.

{EDIT}  Well, well, well.  I may have the cause of the problem:  a bad video codec.  Tried playing a video in winamp and got hard-locked upon again.  {/EDIT}

[kasperl]

Ah. The USB thing puts my geuss for your OS on win98SE, am I right?

Do the lock-ups happen when you are not viewing a vid file?

[JC Denton]

Actually, the OS is 2000.

And as for the lockup happening, it (so far, anyways) hasn't locked up with any audio file or non-video related tasks.  However, the first instance of these lockups was while NWN was running.  At first, I merely discounted the freezing as a program error in the game itself, but with the video buggery I'm thinking it was trying to open a media file in game and it was nailing the faulty codec in the process.