Vista locks up like clockwork, only once daily?

I am having the weirdest problem that I can just not track down and I am really hoping for some insight from the community. Here is the issue, I start up my computer and no matter how I use it after about 5 minutes it will lock up and I am unable to even ctrl-alt-del. It just locks up, no blue screen, nothing, I have to hit the reset button on the computer to get back up and running. After the initial crash I am fine for the rest of the day, no issues ever.

I thought, hmm let me check the event viewer and no problems, I thought it must be a task, nothing shows as an error in the task scheduler. It is just really bugging me. I have tried a Windows repair install, memory diagnostics, check disk, nothing helps. I am just really confused. It has been this way for a while and I am unsure when exactly it began (my bad) so I can not really track it down to a specific application installation.

I hope that someone may have an idea other than me just doing a clean install of Vista, which if I have to I will since this is a really, really annoying issue.

Thank you in advance for any help.

Vista 64bit Business
AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+
Gigabyte M57SLI-S4 (AM2)
4GB RAM
Nvidia GeForce 8600 GT

re: Vista locks up like clockwork, only once daily?

You should go through the list of programs that are started at launch, perhaps one of them is 64-bit incompatible or has some other problem.

It might also help to update all of your drivers.

re: Vista locks up like clockwork, only once daily?

Yea... I had thought of that. There is very little that runs on startup. Anything non Microsoft is a 64bit application. Will try updating each is possible. If it was a driver issue would it not occur more often than once daily. I am sure that it is some kind of task or automatic update checker but even disabling each of the run on start apps I still get this problem.

The kicker is that I can only do any real debugging once daily since the problem only occurs once a day. LOL

re: Vista locks up like clockwork, only once daily?

Hello,

I need to know a few things:
1. When you start your computer on a particular day, after logging in how much time does it takes to lock your PC? You said that time is about 5 minutes. If so, I'm sure you can start a program in this interval. Download ProcessExplorer (an advanced task manager) and run it before your PC restarts. You can see running processes (lookout for anything malicious) and most of them are highlighted. Goto [Options]-->[Configure highlighting] and
you will see what different highlight color means. From [View] menu set update speed to minimum. Now wait and watch for what happens when PC restarts. If you note properly you can probably get some useful information here.



The case that this happens only once a day may suggest that this is related to some scheduled task but there are other possibilities too:

1. I don't know if scheduling a task using 'Schedule Task' GUI program and using 'at' command are similar or different. And so, run command prompt and type (with suffcient privileges):
This should delete all tasks scheculed using 'at'. Mind you, this will delete any other task that you might have scheduled.

2. Another possibility may involve some malicious program that restarts your computer only once a day. Before restarting your PC, it sets some variable to some value that specifies that PC is going to be restarted on that particular day. This happens until some condition is met which in turn triggers other malicious code. Although you have said that you had already looked into autoruns, still (if you had not already tried) I will recommend you to download and run Autoruns to see a detailed list of all autoruns on your PC. You should look into atleast [Logon] and [Scheduled Tasks tab].

3. I will also recommend a memory (and maybe a full computer scan) scan.

4. I also agree with Yarr that some driver might be causing this problem. You can never assume how weirdly drivers are going to behave ;)

Hope this helps...
AmbrNewlearner

re: Vista locks up like clockwork, only once daily?

The thing is, the problem occurs daily, everyday, no matter what day and it never skips a day. It also occurs once and only once ~7 min after hitting the power button. Once restarted I am fine until the next day. I can do as little as just hit the power button and walk away and the system will hang or I can be multitasking with multiple applications with the same effect.

I have never manually scheduled a task so any tasks in the task manager are the default ones defined by MS.

I suppose that it could be a malicious program but only once a day? It would be far more annoying if it happened every '23 min' or (insert random number of minutes here).

I have already run a full memory scan, even swapped the memory with different units from my server.

Have been using Autoruns for a long time now on all my systems. (love it)

Will try ProcessExplorer and will start driver rollbacks since I have tried updating all of my drivers.

I am still leaning towards an automated updater of some type and am still hoping that someone will read this and say "yup programX was doing the same on my system"

Thanks again.

re: Vista locks up like clockwork, only once daily?

Hello,
If this would have happened every few minutes, then this should be really very annoying. But many viruses (especially that have some trigger set to some occasion e.g. Christmas, birthday of virus author etc.) don't do much until the actual payload that is to be executed is delivered on infected PC. A few viruses dating back to 90s used to follow this approach (although any decent antivirus should be able to detect such malicious files).

Since you have already checked scheduled tasks, memory (scan) and Autoruns, I think that is all I can personally think of. I can only wish Good luck! to you now.

AmbrNewlearner