BleepingComputer.com: Sign-in to Windows Live Messenger causes slow freeze of Windows

Hi,

As of yesterday, when I sign in to Windows Live Messenger, a few seconds later Messenger will stop responding. This sometimes happens before the sign-in process is complete, and sometimes several seconds after. Shortly after this, Windows Explorer stops (the Task Bar, Start Menu and any window involving file browsing/ file tree such as "Open" dialogue boxes), then any other programs which are open also stop. It's not a screen freeze, since the mouse and basic keyboard commands still work to some extent - Alt-Tab brings up the switch program box, repeating left-shift for StickyKeys makes the StickyKeys sound, though Ctrl-Alt-Del does nothing. I searched for a considerable period of time both on these forums and on others but with no luck. Has anyone seen something similar?

It may be completely unrelated, but today for about 10mins any attempt to access BleepingComputer would replace the "bleepingcomputer" section of the URL with "google" bringing up either Google's homepage or an internal Google error since rest of the URL belonging to a BleepingComputer site made no sense stuck after "google.com/". This seemed to fix itself after I tried to get to BleepingComputer via a proxy (though this may have been coincidence). I would post this separately but I'm not really interested in this oddity if it doesn't relate to my first problem.

I have tried running SpyBot and AdAware but they only turned up tracking cookies. I also had an uninformed look at a HJT log and didn't see anything exciting.

Alais

This post has been edited by Alais: 30 October 2008 - 12:36 PM

hi,,, when this happens open task manager,,, right click on an empty space on the task bar,,, open task manager and click on the processes tab and look to see how much processor is being used,,, then look in the process tree to see how much live messenger is using,,,, this was happening on my auntie's pc,,, live messenger was using 100% cpu,,, when i clicked on it and ended the process, cpu usage dropped to normal,,,, i then uninstalled live messenger and re installed, everything was ok after this.

Hey figgis,

Thanks for replying, I tried watching the CPU usage on task manager but it showed normal levels all the way until that window froze :/ Reinstalling messenger has no effect either, sadly.

Found the problem. It's to do with the shared folder service provided by messenger. Disable the service in Services - more details here:
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en...5-70da8d2c86e8/

Thanks for letting us know the solution you found. This'll help others who come searching for assistance with this sort of problem!