Another odd issue - My Computer freezes when not connected to school network

[localzuk]

We have a user running an XP laptop which works fine in school. When they use it outside school, they can't open My Computer.

 

If they try, it freezes, explorer.exe crashes and they have to force kill the process in Task manager.

 

Does anyone have any ideas?

 

My chief suspect, as always, will be the anti-virus software (as it has been causing me issues elsewhere already), so I will be turning off the real-time scanner later today, to see if that makes any difference.

 

Other suggestions would be appreciated.

[bladedanny]

I've sometimes known a slight delay if there are mapped drives that the computer can not see. I suppose if it's an old laptop this could cause it to freeze.

[localzuk]

The laptop is only 2 years old with a 2Ghz C2D in it, with 2GB RAM. so it isn't a slow'un.

 

I've seen slight delays, sure, but complete freezing and crashing of explorer is a different issue.

[bladedanny]

Unlikely to be what I suggested then

[Guest TheLibrarian]

I would look at the shortcuts in the Start menu.

 

Shortcuts that use UNC paths rather than driver letters can cause the PC to freeze for upwards of 30 seconds when the servers the UNC paths point to are not available.

[Arthur]

I have had this happen to me and it was due to Windows Explorer looking for some program located on a network share. To help diagnose the issue, you could use Process Monitor like Mark has done in the article below...

 

http://blogs.technet.com/b/markrussinovich/archive/2005/08/28/the-case-of-the-intermittent-and-annoying-explorer-hangs.aspx

[Oxcidius]

We too have had similar issues to this and we resolved it simply by unticking "Automatically search for network folders and printers" in the View tab of Folder Options.

If this was ticked and we were away from the network then it just froze for an age until it decided to give up trying!

Hope this helps you...

[timzim]

Have you got the Securus client on the laptop? This was causing us similar problems.