Program not responding...unable to detect any malware or virus so far

[megavites]

UPDATE!
I think I've found the problem.
I was occasionaly seeing werfault.exe or wermgr.exe (windows prob reporting) in the Taskmgr, so I decided to turn off Windows reporting as well as HP Assist. reporting.
For some reason I decided to unplug the external backup drive after a reboot. Suddenly, everything was fine. No slowdowns or hangs. I plugged the ext. drive back in,
bam, problems again. Unplug and reboot, no problems!

Here's the back story. A few days back, I discovered the ext. drive which is kept on top of the computer, back behind it on the floor. It must have gotten knocked down and there's an issue with the drive. Maybe that's why I also saw MS Search Indexer running in the tskmgr. Maybe it was hanging on the bad drive?

I'm going to keep it disconnected and continue to monitor things. Is there anything I should cleanup from our scans? Assuming everything continues to run well, do you
have any suggestions as far as utilities to run on the ext. drive to see if I can salvage it? Its a Seagate backup Plus.
Dave, I really appreciate your help and I've gained some addt'l knowledge thru this process.

[SuperDave]

do you
have any suggestions as far as utilities to run on the ext. drive to see if I can salvage it? Its a Seagate backup Plus.

You could try running a hard drive diagnostic on it.

Run hard drive diagnostics: tacktech.com
Make sure, you select tool, which is appropriate for the brand of your hard drive.
Depending on the program, it'll create bootable floppy, or bootable CD.
If downloaded file is of .iso type, use ImgBurn: imgburn to burn .iso file to a CD (select "Write image file to disc" option), and make the CD bootable.
For Toshiba hard drives, see here:

Note : If you do not know how to set your computer to boot from CD follow the steps here
************************************************
Click Start> Computer> right click the C Drive and choose Properties> enter
Click Disk Cleanup from there.



Click OK on the Disk Cleanup Screen.
Click Yes on the Confirmation screen.



This runs the Disk Cleanup utility along with other selections if you have chosen any. (if you had a lot System Restore points, you will see a significant change in the free space in C drive)
*************************************************
Go to Microsoft Windows Update and get all critical updates.

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[megavites]

SuperDave,
I thought I was ok, but the problem is back. Not as bad but still locks up and I'm not using the Seagate backup drive.
On a hard boot due to system lockup I had and error..something like
Windows failed to star. A recent hardware or software change might be the cause."
1) Launch startup repair (recommend)
2) Start windows normally

I started windows normally. It will operate fine for a while and then something happens. Seems like a Windows process, but i'm surprised SFC/scanow didn't find anything. There are errors in the windows event viewer that I can post if that helps.
I went thru Evilfantasy's blog about maint. and tried everything, but I'm at a loss right now, short of a system restore or
OS repair.

[SuperDave]

I can't really help with the software/hardware problem. You could try running a diagnostic on your own harddrive and following that, a repair of the OS.