Vista Enterprise freezing

[Oops_my_bad]

Hi all

At the end of my tether now

We have a room full of PC's which we have imaged with Vista Enterprise SP1

However at random times they will just freeze

I initially thought it was they keyboard and mouse and have since replaced these with USB type ones, but no improvement

I turned off the windows desktop manager service via GPO (in doing so also disables Aero) as that's what a lot of others were suggesting in the forums, that it was the Aero theme and the computers inability to handle it. This didnt work either

The boards are all Intel D101GGC, 1GB RAM, built in graphics. I dont think it's an image problem as we rebuilt a few of them only to have the same problem

[kmount]

Checked the usual event viewer places?

[Oops_my_bad]

Yip -nothing is logged other than "abrubt system shutdown" or some such when the system boots up again

[SYNACK]

Things that I would check would be:
BIOS upgrades
scan RAM with memtest86
make sure that the video card drivers are fully up to date from the primary company ie nVidia rather than MS update
check PSU voltages with diagnostic software while the pcs are under load to make sure that they are not too far under

[IanT]

could it be your build/image?

maybe wipe one desktop and just build that one see what happens.

IT

[Oops_my_bad]

Thanks for the suggestions guys

However still have the issue

We've had to rebuild a few anyway due to corruption. They are built using a WDS image which we have successfully used on other machines/laptops that do not display this behaviour

I've got the latest on board drivers from ATI which are vista-certified

I have updated the BIOS's on a few to test out but these ones exhibit the same behaviour. Also memtest looks good on 2 that I have tested

I've tried running add-on PCI-E graphics cards on a few but these are still crashing!

Any more suggestions, however far-fetched welcome!!

[saundersmatt]

We're suffering similar problems here at the moment. Just going to outline our issues and hope that somebody can point us in the right direction.

We have 5 rooms, of identically specced machines all running vista. The random freezing is only a majot problem in one room.

Things to note :
We are running all applications via microsoft application virtualisation.
Freezes most often occur when running office 2007 apps (namely publisher)
The machine will only recover with a forced reboot, but it is not totally dead, i.e. the computer will ping, you can access it's shares, view event viewer and initiate a remote desktop session - which justs there saying waiting for current logged on user to respond.
Nothing is logged in the event viewer.

I have no idea what's causing this but it is becoming a real headache. Somebody, please have a brainwave for me.

[TheCrust]

It's not anything related to UAC trying to grab focus is it?

I've seen a couple of machines - even my laptop - apparently freeze then after a few seconds there's the flashing in the taskbar as the UAC control tries to get my attention.

Click on that and I get the usual UAC darkened screen with "you have moved a mouse and windows needs your permission to continue" type of message. Approve it, and the workstation comes back to life.

It made me wonder quite why UAC was popping up in the background unseen at first and in the end I attributed it to clicking on a window to change focus at exactly the same moment UAC sprang into life.

May be worth knocking UAC on the head if you haven't already, just to check?

[Oops_my_bad]

Yes, i've noticed it more with Publisher with the issues I'm having, and also Flash stuff

We've disabled UAC and modified the power/suspend/HDD setttings so that basically the computer doesnt try to goto sleep.

It's got to the point now where we're just going to re-image the room with a clean XP SP3 build

[TheCrust]

Hmmm.

I know a schools agreement allows you to run Enterprise, but we chose to run Business when we migrated the entire school across over a year ago.

Our environment runs relatively faultlessly and we've since updated our images to SP1 without issue over this summer.

Could it be worthwhile building a Vista Business image and seeing if you get the same problems? Just to identify if it's any of the additional Enterprise stuff that could be tripping the machines up?

Aside from the UAC thing occasionally popping up on machines that aren't controlled by any specific OU, the only other time I've seen a vista machine pause - and that's all it is, a ten second hang or so - is when Office 2007 was referencing a networked drive on a Server 2003 machine - for instance when adding an attachment in outlook, opening or saving a file, inserting a picture, that sort of thing.

[Dos_Box]

1 GB RAM is a little low for Vista. It is happier at 2GB and above. Is there no pointers in the event logs? You could also try checking for any BIOS updates for your affected PCs.