Intermittent CPU lockup after reboot

[ceknight]

Ok, I've read and searched for a similar problem, but not quite what I have going on. Excuse me if I do cross over into something that has been covered. This one really has me scratching my head.

I have a Gateway e4000 series that in the past year or so locks up after a reboot. It never locks up during the boot. Everything will come up fine, work for an unspecified number of minutes then go to sleep. If I bring up the task manager and view the CPU usage I can watch it all of a sudden spike to 100% and stay there. I still have function of the keyboard and mouse and can actually go to START... TURN OFF COMPUTER...RESTART (or) SHUT DOWN and enter, but nothing happens. Won't run another program either. The only way to get out of it is to, "horrors", power down and reboot again. Sometime 2, 3, 4 or more cycles before it comes back to life.  Once I get a good boot to stay up it's fine and will run and run until the next reboot.  It's to the point that I NEVER turn it off and it makes me gringe everytime Windows does an update that requires a boot.

Seeing as how it is fine after it finally comes back to life, I hardly think it's software related. Why would the software care if it's been on for 5 minutes or 5 years? A Power Judge told me I had a bad -5 volts on PS, so I replaced it... nope. Replaced the mother board with the same type (but didn't change the CPU).... nope. Ran Memtest86 til it was blue in the face...nope. PC Doctor, of course, says everything is fine.
Have been considering the hard drive, but the thought of finding and reinstalling all the software doesn't take me to a happy place. Oh sure, I have a good image backup, but if it  IS software I would think restoring the backuped software would put me in the same place so installing a new drive is my last resort.

I'm at a loss as to the next step. Here's what I have:

Gateway e4000 (stop laughing... it suits my needs... most of the time)
4000828 motherboard, Pentium 4 at 2 Ghz, internal graphics
2 GB memory
Maxtor 2F040J0 40GB hardrive
Windows XP Professional with SP3, all updates current (except the dreaded IE8)

Any thoughts would be much appreciated. Since my Kilowatcher monitor tells me it costs me $12 bucks a month just to keep this thing on all the time, I'd love to be able to turn it off now and then.

[patio]

Have you considered that Kilowatcher may be the culprit here ? ?

[Geek-9pm]

OK. I will ask.
What is Kilowatcher?
How may it harm a  computer?

[ceknight]

Geek-9pm,

The Kilowatcher is actually called a Kill-A-Watt Ez from P3. A great little plug in device that you plug into the wall and plug whatever you want to monitor into it. Enter your electric company's price per kilowatt and it will tell you exactly how much any 120v appliance/device is costing you in electricity.

And... to answer patio's question... hadn't thought about that, but it's not the culprit. I removed it long ago and it's now watching my new HDTV/home theater/Blue Ray/DirecTV Tivo setup, which I'm happy to report only costs me $4.44/mo. 

Update: I did a boot this morning.... same as usual and looked at the processes running and the culprit running at the time of lockup was mdm.exe at 99%. Does this ring any bells or turn on any lightbulbs for anybody?

Appreciate the reads and responses.

[Geek-9pm]

Mdm.exe is the Machine Debug Manager, which is used by the Windows NT Option Pack and Microsoft Developer Studio to provide application debugging.
Have you been running script debug in MS Office?

[Salmon Trout]

Mdm.exe is the Machine Debug Manager, which is used by the Windows NT Option Pack and Microsoft Developer Studio to provide application debugging.
Have you been running script debug in MS Office?

If the one running is not located in C:\Windows\System32 then it is probably a virus, spyware, trojan or worm.

[ceknight]

Thanks again for the replies.
No, I haven't been debugging anything, unless it's been doing it on it's own. How would I check?

The only instance of the mdm.exe I can find is:
c:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\VS&Debug. Virus checker isn't finding anything wrong with it.

[Broni]

If I bring up the task manager and view the CPU usage I can watch it all of a sudden spike to 100% and stay there.

What process is the main CPU "eater"?

[ceknight]

Hi Broni,
As mentioned a little bit ago, it appeared that it was mdm.exe, at 99%, the last time it hung. Not sure if that's the culprit every time. Will have to keep an eye on it. Any thoughts?

[Broni]

Any reason, you have that service running?

[ceknight]

No, not that I am aware of. I was under the assumption that Windows was using it. It appears to be in the processes under SYSTEM of both this desktop and our laptop also. Most of the time it is open, but showing 00% CPU usage. I could end the process through task manager, but suppose it would just restart when I reboot.

[patio]

DLoad and install StartupCPL from Mike Lin....
Use it to turn the service off...

[ceknight]

Happy Holidays Folks and thanks again for all the replies! Sorry it has been so long to update, but it HAD actually been behaving lately and with the bustle of activity around this time of year, haven't had a lot of time for troubleshooting.

However... back to the drawing board.  Thanks for the info... I was able to disable the debugger mdm.exe and at first seemed to be much better, oh happy day. Without rehashing my symptoms, which you can see in earlier post, I'm still having problems with reboots. Didn't find one til we lost power a few days ago and like the ghosts in the movie Poltergeist... seemed to be saying... "I'm baaaack"!

But, since disabling the debugger, the CPU is NOT pegging out at 100% when the system goes to sleep and no other processes are running excessively. In fact the CPU almost shows comatose except for an occasional heartbeat blip, showing that it is definitely alive. All the other symptoms are exactly the same as I described earlier and I still have to do several hard boots to get it to come back to life for more than a few minutes. Almost makes me think that the debugger was detecting something when it was enabled, and was doing something when the whole thing went to sleep. Hence the CPU showing that it was working 100% on mdm.exe when the rest of the system went to sleep.  Please tell me if my thinking is way off base here.

Still a head scratcher, albeit a very frustrating one. Especially, when the wife wanted to get the Christmas card labels and letters printed quickly before the post office closed. Then the power went out....aaarrrgghh! Believe me... it almost wound up in the snowbank that day!

Everybody have a GREAT Christmas!

[Broni]

eMachines infamous issue is really bad power supply, so you may want to start with replacing it.

[ceknight]

Thanks Broni, but going back to my original post, that was the first thing I tried.