Applications are becoming suspended for one member of staff

[cheaptonersucks]

Hi,

Only one member of staff keeps reporting that various applications, such as SIMS, Notepad ++ often become suspended and are then unresponsive. Edge and Chrome are also becoming suspended, which is causing delays of 10 minutes or so before the apps start functioning correctly apparently!

 

I have uninstalled the apps and have deleted the local profile but that has made no difference. I have checked the logs, but nothing obvious is occurring.

 

It’s just the head of Computing that appears to be experiencing “suspended” programs as no other teachers have reported this.

 

Just wondered if anyone else has experienced this with 3rd party application and windows 10 Education?

 

Thanks in advance!

[cburrows]

sounds similar to a member of staff here having the Pc either log her back out or the screen go black when she logs in or uses Sims. (i have a thread for my issue as i have run out of ideas. Only thing i noticed was permissions on the home drive/folders were set incorrectly for our user. setting them correctly later this morning. We also found our user had 2 home folders! so deleting both and recreating too.

So i would maybe try permissions or check any group policy which might be running after log on, also Antivirus? might be worth checking the pc in question for when updates are installed or run.

[round2it]

i think edge/chrome has a suspend option somewhere it freezes pages to save memory and processor usage maybe this has been set but as the post says its sims so may not be related

[round2it]

if you go to Settings>Privacy>Background Apps and uncheck the button for all the apps, does it work?

[mavhc]

Run a disk check and make sure there's enough ram. In Task Manager Details right click hung process and Analyse Wait Chain.

[cheaptonersucks]

Thanks for your suggestions. Several applications appear to be getting suspended and apart from Edge, the others are 3rd part apps like Notepad ++. No other members of staff have reported this and I have never seen this issue and have an older lower spec machine than the head of computing! He has a new HP ProDesk 400 G7 with 8GB of RAM, just like all the classrooms have. I have checked the home folder and permissions and everything seems fine. We use Sophos AV across the school but that is up to date just like all the other classrooms. It’s not just one machine as the head of computing is experiencing this issue on another computer which is good spec.He is only running a browser and SIMS when this occurs.

 

I will check everything that you have all suggested!

 

Thanks!

[Foresthippy]

It’s not just one machine as the head of computing is experiencing this issue on another computer which is good spec.

 

Do you use roaming profiles?

[simpsonj]

Had a similar problem here with a few machines. In our case, I believe it's a mapped drive that's causing the issue; once I disconnected the laptop from the wireless, everything ran as normal. Unmapped all the drives and reconnected, everything normal. Reconnected each drive one by one and all working as expected. I've removed an unnecessary mapped drive, and fingers crossed that solves the problem going forward...

[Chris_Cook]

Is it overheating and throttling the CPU speed down?

 

Sounds like a performance issue of some kind, so maybe check for other logged in users, or SSD health, RAM usage, chrome extensions etc.

 

Another thing might be a corrupted home drive (or files on it). I'd maybe create them a new temporary one and see if that fixes it.

[cheaptonersucks]

Thanks everyone for your advice! We ditched roaming profiles when we migrated to windows 10. They were causing havoc with all sorts of areas including shortcuts going missing from the start menu!

 

That’s interesting regarding the mapped drive issue, although only the affected user seems to be experiencing this “suspended” application issue. We have new HP G7’s in all classrooms, so decent spec machines and it only “appears” to be an issue for the head of computing. He has the same mapped drives as everyone else.

 

We have folder redirection but no issues with any other staff.

 

Both machines that the affected user is experiencing this on are decent spec and have new SSD drives as they are new machines. Only 8GB memory but these machines seem pretty fast for what they are used for.

 

I can check the home folder again.

Edited June 7, 2022 by cheaptonersucks

[psydii]

This is strange because the received wisdom is that Win32 Apps don't support the 'suspended' state. I did see a note about Chrome sometimes getting in the state due to a corrupted profile. This lends further weight to deleting the user's local profile and allowing it to rebuild, but you have already tried that.

 

My guess at a root cause though would be some anti-malware / Remote administration tool fouling something up*, perhaps with a transient update, but once broken the problem persists. If deleting the user profile doesn't work, then a wipe/reload of the machine is perhaps in order?

 

*a dependency on a disconnected network share, slightly faulty hardware, or a dodgy driver can all also put unexpected blocks on applications, that then in turn trigger the same sorts of bugs that blocks cased by anti-malware software do.

[cheaptonersucks]

Your right, these applications shouldn’t be getting suspended. It never occurs for me and therefore I can’t replicate it at all. As you mentioned the last resort is to reimagine both machines but it just seems a bit extreme. It’s odd that only this user is affected!

[mavhc]

You say "suspended", what exactly do you mean by this, how do you know they're suspended?

[cheaptonersucks]

Edge, Chrome, SIMS, Notepad ++ are showing as “suspended” in windows task manager for the user. He has stated that the programs become unresponsive when they become suspended and can take up to 15 minutes to start working again!!

[cheaptonersucks]

It’s only one user that has reported this.

 

[mavhc]

Turns out you can suspend normal win32 processes. Try with resmon.exe. So and then they'd do nothing unless you went into resmon.exe and resumed them.

 

Question is therefore what is causing them to be suspended. Some kind of battery saver? Is it running on battery? Has he installed anything? And what causes them to be resumed again.

 

Don't see a way to log suspend/resume events

[cheaptonersucks]

That’s interesting that you can suspend normal win32 processes using resmon.exe. He doesn’t have permissions to access resmon.exe. Only admins can access that.

 

It’s very odd, as no other member of staff is experiencing ‘suspended’ processes...I would love to know why these apps are getting suspended! This is occurring on desktops only as we only use desktops in classrooms and offices. He can’t install anything as staff do not have permission to install software.

 

This is driving me nuts!!

[mavhc]

Get a list of every process running and compare to another computer?

 

Also use autoruns to see what's running automatically

[cheaptonersucks]

Thanks, I will get a list of all processes and compare with another machine.

 

I will give Autoruns a try as I have never used that previously.

[mavhc]

There's some hints that Windows 10 is doing it itself, but no details

[davidhernandez]

Hi, we were facing the same issue in our company. It started just after enrolling all our computers into Microsoft Intune. For more than a year we tried a lot of things without success. Recently we discovered that it was our own proxy that was creating the issue. Its a proxy on a Sophos UTM. Something about it seems to not communicate correctly with the Azure user authentication or the application security checks...We have the proxy configured through a WPAD file. We tried changing some settings but only disabling the proxy on the affected computers fixed the issue. In a couple of months we will update our vpn/proxy to Zscaler and hope that it doesnt happen again.

 

 

I post this here hoping to help other people in the same situation so that they don't have to spend months investigating as we have done in our IT department.

 

 

Cheers.

[KDW1987]

On 30/06/2023 at 09:35, davidhernandez said:

Hi, we were facing the same issue in our company. It started just after enrolling all our computers into Microsoft Intune. For more than a year we tried a lot of things without success. Recently we discovered that it was our own proxy that was creating the issue. Its a proxy on a Sophos UTM. Something about it seems to not communicate correctly with the Azure user authentication or the application security checks...We have the proxy configured through a WPAD file. We tried changing some settings but only disabling the proxy on the affected computers fixed the issue. In a couple of months we will update our vpn/proxy to Zscaler and hope that it doesnt happen again.

 

 

I post this here hoping to help other people in the same situation so that they don't have to spend months investigating as we have done in our IT department.

 

 

Cheers.

Are you still working in education? If you are looking to use scaler for education I had noticed they are not listed as an approved web filtering vendor with the UK safer Internet centre for offsite filtering