Repeated hanging

About a week after I got this laptop, I started having an odd problem where Windows would just lockup. When this happened, any program I tried to do an action with would freeze but not go to the "Not Responding" status, and any part of the interface that I used (start button, dell dock, even the desktop icons) would freeze until the problem stopped. I wouldn't be able to open task manager, but if I had it open, it would show 0% cpu usage the entire time. These lockups usually last about 30 seconds or so at maximum.

I figured I'd just deal with it since it usually happened only when I installed something. However, I was using the Resource Monitor utility for another reason when it happened and I saw that the process dllhost.exe was trying to read the hard drive ad infinitum (something in the hundreds of millions of bytes per second). I checked out the hard drive activity light on my laptop and, sure enough, it was solid. As soon as the light started flickering and dimmed, dllhost.exe stopped whatever it was doing and Windows stopped hanging. Subsequent events also showed that it was always dllhost.exe.

I don't have a huge amount of technical knowledge, but I do know what dllhost.exe does. I did a virus scan and a manual search for it outside of the system32 folder and couldn't find it, so the likelihood of it being malware is small. Should I be looking for a bad driver, or what?

Edit: Also, I just noticed that if I try to view processes from all users, dllhost.exe is running twice under "SYSTEM" and both processes disappear about 5 seconds later. Happens every time I re-open task manager.

Shardx1 said:

About a week after I got this laptop, I started having an odd problem where Windows would just lockup. When this happened, any program I tried to do an action with would freeze but not go to the "Not Responding" status, and any part of the interface that I used (start button, dell dock, even the desktop icons) would freeze until the problem stopped. I wouldn't be able to open task manager, but if I had it open, it would show 0% cpu usage the entire time. These lockups usually last about 30 seconds or so at maximum.

I figured I'd just deal with it since it usually happened only when I installed something. However, I was using the Resource Monitor utility for another reason when it happened and I saw that the process dllhost.exe was trying to read the hard drive ad infinitum (something in the hundreds of millions of bytes per second). I checked out the hard drive activity light on my laptop and, sure enough, it was solid. As soon as the light started flickering and dimmed, dllhost.exe stopped whatever it was doing and Windows stopped hanging. Subsequent events also showed that it was always dllhost.exe.

I don't have a huge amount of technical knowledge, but I do know what dllhost.exe does. I did a virus scan and a manual search for it outside of the system32 folder and couldn't find it, so the likelihood of it being malware is small. Should I be looking for a bad driver, or what?

Edit: Also, I just noticed that if I try to view processes from all users, dllhost.exe is running twice under "SYSTEM" and both processes disappear about 5 seconds later. Happens every time I re-open task manager.

If it is a new Dell system that came with Win7 have you tried contacting Dell?