machine stalls sporadically

Of late, sporadically but frequently, my 1.7 GHz, 750 Mbyte RAM,
WinXP-pro machine seems to stall for a few seconds at a time; you can’t
even get the cursor to move. I appears that some application is totally
tying up the CPU. Using Windows Task Manager to monitor CPU usage, I
note that when the machine “stalls,” Task Manager halts as well. The
application called “Process Explorer” from sysInternals.com indicates
that at times the “running” application is CCAPP.exe from Symantec; at
other times it is Thunderbird from Mozilla; and at other times it is yet
other Symantec tools.

I suspect that some virus checking feature has been given the highest of
high priorities, and all other work stops until it has done the virus
scan. I can see the rationale. Is my suspicion correct, and is there
anyway to get around this annoying delay without disabling the virus
scan features?

windsurferLA wrote:

> Of late, sporadically but frequently, my 1.7 GHz, 750 Mbyte RAM,
> WinXP-pro machine seems to stall for a few seconds at a time; you can't
> even get the cursor to move. I appears that some application is totally
> tying up the CPU. Using Windows Task Manager to monitor CPU usage, I
> note that when the machine "stalls," Task Manager halts as well. The
> application called "Process Explorer" from sysInternals.com indicates
> that at times the "running" application is CCAPP.exe from Symantec; at
> other times it is Thunderbird from Mozilla; and at other times it is yet
> other Symantec tools.
>
> I suspect that some virus checking feature has been given the highest of
> high priorities, and all other work stops until it has done the virus
> scan. I can see the rationale. Is my suspicion correct, and is there
> anyway to get around this annoying delay without disabling the virus
> scan features?

go start menu/run type eventvwr.msc and have a look through those logs
and it should give you an idea of what has caused the fault.

Flamer.