Windows 7 Freezing

[acrobson]

Hi all,

I just wondered, has anyone had problems with explorer freezing on a Windows 7 professional installation.

I am running a test machine of Windows 7 Pro on a Windows server 2003 Active Directory and the machine works fine for a while, however after a couple of hours, if you go to an explorer window, such as 'My Computer' you get the green progress bar in the address bar at the top as if it's trying to load and then just hangs forever.

If you then try and log off and restart or shutdown, it does go to log off, however, all you get is 'Logging Off......' and it just stays there with the blue circle timer thing going around.

I have also noticed, when this happens, it fails to update the roaming profile on the home drive server. I have even completely rebuilt the original test machine with the Win7 installation and tried another different machine with different hardware.

[_Adam_]

Sounds like a network issue, see if the same happens with a local user account. Make sure the local user does not have any mapped drives while testing.

[glennda]

are you running securus by any chance? we had a similar problem to this but not with windows 7. turned out it was securus causing it - they sent us an update and all has been fine since

toby

[acrobson]

Sounds like a network issue, see if the same happens with a local user account. Make sure the local user does not have any mapped drives while testing.

I was thinking along the lines of a network issue, as when I tried it with a local account, in the early days of testing, all worked fine, then as soon as a roaming AD profile was used, with mapped drives etc etc, the so called 'Green Ribbon of Death' started appearing when enter the likes of 'My Computer.

However, all of the XP cleints run fine, without a hitch.

I have found a few google results that say the only option is to end 'explorer.exe' through the task manager, but surely there is a patch/fix for this, as once this it's rolled out, you cannot expect end users to have access to task manager let alone know what to do with it!

[_Adam_]

Ok, so it's either a network problem or server issue. Windows 7 likes to check all drives (including mapped drives) before opening Windows Explorer or My Computer. It is waiting for a response or time out when you see the green ribbon. XP does not do this and so chances are you're seeing something XP is hiding.

I hate mimicking Microsoft Support (I have called them a bit ), but I would start with totally disabling AV on the servers involved and see if this makes a difference. If they are not running AV, can you tell me is it only the home folder looking to a server? Any folder redirection? Is there a chance the home folder permissions are wrong at somepoint? (share permissions, folder permissions, etc)

[acrobson]

Ok, so it's either a network problem or server issue. Windows 7 likes to check all drives (including mapped drives) before opening Windows Explorer or My Computer. It is waiting for a response or time out when you see the green ribbon. XP does not do this and so chances are you're seeing something XP is hiding.

I hate mimicking Microsoft Support (I have called them a bit ), but I would start with totally disabling AV on the servers involved and see if this makes a difference. If they are not running AV, can you tell me is it only the home folder looking to a server? Any folder redirection? Is there a chance the home folder permissions are wrong at somepoint? (share permissions, folder permissions, etc)

Hi,

AV isn't a problem. All folder permissions are fine from what I can tell, I have used both fresh user profiles on the windows 7 machine as well as a profile which is used on both XP and Win7, with a username.v2 extentions on the end.

There is a home drive mapped to the home drive server, as well as numerous other drives mapped to various SAN and NAS drives.

Hows that?

[_Adam_]

Pretty good

By saying AV is not an issue I assume you don't have it. Only because I had a similar issue (but not this one) with Symantec Endpoint Protection and finally found a small hot fix for the solution even though it seemed fine otherwise. That or you have already disabled it.

If you have not already done so, can you start with only the home drive mapped, test, then if okay add another mapped drive and so on?

[_Adam_]

Are you running 32 or 64 bit 7?

[acrobson]

Are you running 32 or 64 bit 7?

I'm running 64 bit Win 7 and 32 bit XP. All of our hardware can handle 64 bit, so thought...Why not )

So far I have removed one network drive, a one which I mapped a while back to another test machine which is now been turned off for a while. I wonder if that is what has been causing the problem?

Saying that, one, would'nt it cause Win7 to freeze all the time when opening explorer windows and not just 85% of the time and two, the XP machine has the mapped drive to the same turned off machine and works fine.

Good old win XP )

[_Adam_]

One other quick find on the Internet, some AV clients on the workstation will attempt to scan network drives. I have found posts where people experienced the same as you and resolved it with disabling network scans. They were 64 bit too but I don't think it would matter.

[glennda]

Do the user's affected have dead shortcuts in there my doc's? as you may find windows is trying to follow the shortcuts on the win 7 machines (whereas xp might have just ignored them) but cannot contact the source if it doesn't exist. This normally happens after a file server move where shortcuts point to UNC path's rather then mapped drives.

Toby