Windows 7: Apphang with literally any program

Hi everyone,

I recently purchased a SSD and installed it into my PC. Since then I have been running into a number of weird issues and crashes. First it started with skype crashing/hanging and generally acting weird. Whenever I would shutdown my PC I'd need to force restart because skype would never close and then the pc would hang at the Shutting Down screen with the swirling spinner. The only way to shut it down would be to hit the power on it.

Its strange because its still spinning so it isn't crashing, its actively trying to do something. I know because when I hit the reset button it'd freeze and stop spinning, usually then it'd reboot in a second or two.

I'm on my 5th or 6th reinstall since friday trying to figure out this problem. At first it was only skype acting up and I uninstalled it thinking that it was just skype not wanting to work with my PC but now I'm starting to have other programs hang. I read around on these forums and the one thing that I seen suggested was a memory dump. I just graduated from a 2 year tech school, a pretty good one, and I have never played with memory dumps before. I changed my dump files to be small dump files.

This morning I found one of my programs had crashed and I was able to make a dump file, 1.1gigs in size, and when I opened it with the windows debugging tool I got these lines of code:



Microsoft (R) Windows Debugger Version 6.2.8400.0 AMD64
Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.


Loading Dump File [C:\Users\Tony\Desktop\Diablo III.DMP]
User Mini Dump File with Full Memory: Only application data is available

Symbol search path is: *** Invalid ***
****************************************************************************
* Symbol loading may be unreliable without a symbol search path. *
* Use .symfix to have the debugger choose a symbol path. *
* After setting your symbol path, use .reload to refresh symbol locations. *
****************************************************************************
Executable search path is:
Windows 7 Version 7601 (Service Pack 1) MP (4 procs) Free x64
Product: WinNt, suite: SingleUserTS
Machine Name:
Debug session time: Tue Jul 17 08:40:41.000 2012 (UTC - 4:00)
System Uptime: 0 days 19:45:38.383
Process Uptime: 0 days 8:35:18.000
....................................................WARNING: profapi overlaps mswsock
.WARNING: winspool overlaps version
WARNING: winspool overlaps wow64cpu
...........
WARNING: authz overlaps PeerDist
.WARNING: rasapi32 overlaps authz
...WARNING: SensApi overlaps IPHLPAPI
....WARNING: FWPUCLNT overlaps dnsapi
.WARNING: NapiNSP overlaps comctl32
................WARNING: propsys overlaps dnsapi
..WARNING: MMDevAPI overlaps winmm
....WARNING: AudioSes overlaps MMDevAPI
....WARNING: rsaenh overlaps cryptsp
....WARNING: MSVCR100_CLR0400 overlaps AcLayers
........WARNING: GdiPlus overlaps d3d9
...........
*** ERROR: Symbol file could not be found. Defaulted to export symbols for ntdll.dll -
*** WARNING: symbols timestamp is wrong 0x4ce7ca38 0x4e212273 for wow64cpu.dll
wow64cpu!TurboDispatchJumpAddressEnd+0x6c0:
00000000`74cf2e09 c3 ret
"

I can see that its telling me that I haven't loaded a file for the symbols but it seems to load a default one at the end? Does this information give anyone an insight to some problem that I'm having? Its more than just this game crashing, Firefox will also crash on me. This is just the first dump file I've gotten and I'm not even at home with the crashing PC, I have remote access to it.

Something I think this problem came from was setting my BIOS for AHCI for the new SSD. That was the only real change I've made, I've installed on 3 separate hard drives and all of them had the same issues, all of them still had AHCI set. At some point I'm going to swap back to SATA and see if the issue still persists and if not... that's not a good thing because then I can't make the most of the SSD.

Try the SATA drive first with the AHCI turned off.
Then try the SATA drive with AHCI turned on
Any differences?

Then try the SSD on the one that worked best.
Be sure that your SSD firmware is the latest available from the SSD manufacturer's website (not the DVD that came with it). Also ensure that the controller drivers on your mobo is the latest available.

To fix the symbols, open the debugger and select: File...Symbol File Path
Paste the following into the box there and click on OK.
Then, when closing the debugger, answer Yes the first time it asks to save the Workspace (and answer "No" every time after that)