up vote 0 down vote favorite
share [g+] share [fb]

I am having a problem on some PCs where the window title bar disappears, then network drive connections get broken and various error messages concerning inadequate resources appear. Yet Proc Explorer shows nothing untoward and plenty available memory and cpu. How do I go about finding which app might be causing this?

link|improve this question
feedback

3 Answers

up vote 2 down vote

This sounds like an application is leaking resources. Even good old task manager can help you see if that's the case:

Go to the Processes tab. View menu -> Select Columns. Some columns to watch for abnormal values are Handle Cound, Thread Count (not very common) and GDI Objects.

An application leaking handles or GDI Objects could very well cause what's happening. A combination could also empty the nonpaged pool of kernel memory, causing inadequate resources.

link|improve this answer
What would abnormal values be? I have some apps using 800+ GDI objects, some using 1800 handles and some with 50 threads. I thought I had found something - there were 67,000 files all named sxp????.tmp in my local settings\temp directory, all of zero bytes size. I deleted them all but still have the problem. – Graeme Jul 31 '09 at 14:58
None of those seem exceptionally high I'm afraid. What do the event logs say, if anything? – chankster Jul 31 '09 at 15:33
Turns out an issue with our Visual Source Safe database was causing the problem. Everytime someone opened Visual Studio things would start to go weird. But we found this through trial and error.... – Graeme Aug 3 '09 at 15:29
feedback
up vote 0 down vote

I haven't seen a PC experience this since Windows 98! Using Process Explorer, try to find an application that is causing a large number of virtual memory page faults (having to read memory from disk).

Is the machine running out of phyiscal memory? (Start->Run->Taskmgr, at the bottom of the process window, is the first number of 'commit charge' larger than how much memory the machine has?

alt text

link|improve this answer
feedback
up vote 0 down vote

How many PC's does this happen on verses how many do you have? have you had updates recently that only went on these pc's? could be a virus, do you have up to date anti virus? have you done a full scan?

To be honest I would just re-image the affected machines as you can't trust windows when things like this happen and who has the time these days.

Stuart

link|improve this answer
feedback

Your Answer

 
or
required, but never shown
discard