Locking up poota

My sons poota keeps locking up, its windows XP pro and he has run
Adware, Spyware, Hijack and so on but nothing found. Looking at Task
Manager does not show any medium or high CPU usage at that time.
Hovering the Mouse over a link shows the hourglass running. Run the
machine in Safe mode and you get a Black empty screen, not blank as it
has safe in all the corners etc but no windows showing. Task manager can
be activated so the machine is not stuckted. He has run some file active
software and cant find any nasties. Any other ideas?

Old Grizzly...

Ah yes and he has tried isolating from the Broadband too with no
improvement

linkuk...

Tried a system restore yet going back a few days or more?

Old Grizzly...

He says he hasnt as if the problem has *infected* his restore it would
be a viscous circle

linkuk...

If its infected his restore he will be no worse off. If however his restore
is ok then it could cure the problem.
He could run a couple of the free virus checkers before doing a restore to
see if that reveals a problem If it finds a problem then hopefully the
problem can be cured. If it finds nothing then makes sense to do a restore
still.
If the problem is severe he may find the restore option wont be open to him
anyway. (it will show no dates to go back to)
If he looks at download.com there are always free virus checkers around and
sometimes one will find a virus that another doesnt.

Old Grizzly...

Yes he has tried Virus checkers along with spyware checkers and so on as
you say some will some wont. i think he is at might well as reinstall
point now :(

linkuk...

At least doing re-install isnt as bad ait used to be when i first started o
windows about 1993 or so hen you used to have to have about 15 floppies and
umpteen othersfor support oftware and took forever and you couldnt even
leave it for a few minutes.
I keep all my key software on an extrernal usb drive. This saves so much
time and means i dont need to find install cds etc.

Just a thought on the locking up problem, does he do a ctl-alt-del to then
close down individual items to establish if there is one program thats
causing a problem.
Ive had freezing from time to time and found a largish file/program called
"dump" and by closing it down cured the freeze.

Old Grizzly...

Yes he restarted a minimal system and all was ok but tried to introduce
other progs but then the story to me got a bit muddy so i shall have to
leave him there i think ;-) his patience level has been exhausted :)