computer freezing on screen saver exit

[phoenixmark]

This is not happening all the time, but enough times for me to disable the screen saver. I use the Windows supplied screen saver, in this case, ribbons. It comes on when it is supposed to, but when I go to use the computer and do a mouse movement to exit the screen saver, the screen saver freezes and the only way to use my computer is to reboot the computer by forcing a shutdown with the on/off button. Thanks for any suggestions.
Mark

 

[MourningStar]

try a system restore to a time prior to the issue.

 

[dsperber]

Let's try to consolidate discussion on this problem, as there are now THREE threads that I am aware of (on SevenForums alone, not counting elsewhere on the Interweb in other forums).

I'd like to propose any continuation of discussion on this topic to the new thread which was created today, complaining of "Windows random freezes".

Same with a similar thread complaining of "Random PC freezing - no pattern", which is also currently active and which I have also suggested be consolidated going forward on the same "Windows random freezes" thread.

Rather than post similar or duplicate remarks to three threads, let's just use that one "Windows random freezes" thread solely, from now on.

 

[MourningStar]

Let's try to consolidate discussion on this problem, as there are now THREE threads that I am aware ...

No, unless someone is multi-posting the same issue. Each incident will likely involve different h/w and other unique variables. Imagine consolidating bsod's into a single thread, ...the horror, the horror ...

 

[dsperber]

No, unless someone is multi-posting the same issue. Each incident will likely involve different h/w and other unique variables. Imagine consolidating bsod's into a single thread, ...the horror, the horror ...

Respectfully, this "freezing" is a major problem It was first reported last year and was originally and already theorized to possibly be caused by a whole mess of assorted possible causes, including hardware failure, corruption in Windows (which might be "cured" through SFC), screensaver on or off, USB external removable devices, wired/wireless mouse and keyboard, etc., none of which has been definitively been found to have been the cause.

Consequently there is no current solution that applies to everyone's own version of the "freeze", because the cause of the problem is still unknown. Absolutely everybody's hardware and software setup and customization are almost certainly different than everybody else's, and yet we all are experiencing the very same "freeze". Why not share everybody's story in one place, which may rattle some cages and light up some bulbs that give someone a new idea they never had before, perhaps eventually letting all of us discover what it is that we really do have in common (aside from Win7) which might never otherwise surface in multiple individual threads with individual suggestions from others?

I honestly don't care if this thread is to be uniquely continued or not with additional contributions from others. I only wanted to really point out that there are now at least THREE pretty identical threads describing the identical problem: "freeze" of mouse/keyboard/screen, while Windows may continue for the most part to run (though hobbled) for some additional time before it finally does become totally unusable and require a hard power-off/on sequence to re-boot. No BSOD, just an external "freeze" of the human interface devices. And yet Windows continues to run inside the machine, including updating the displayed clock time normally. So the system isn't completely frozen.

 

[phoenixmark]

Thanks for the replies. I do not know if windows is running, not running, showing an error message, or what. My display is all black except for wherever the screen saver stopped running when I move the mouse to come out of screen saver. I have no other issues with my pc other than this random intermittent lock up. I have disabled screensaver and have no more freezes. If I enable screensaver, it may take two weeks to happen again.

 

[dsperber]

Just out of curiosity, do you have your desktop machine as the only machine on your home network? Or do you have other machines on your LAN?

What other programs, if any, that you auto-start with Windows as part of "startup" and thus which are active all the time even if no manually other program windows are also open? Do you run any hardware monitoring programs (like Aida64), and if so do they report HDD/SSD drive temperatures?

What brand of mouse do you have, and is it wired or wireless? What other USB and/or removable devices and/or external drives do you also have plugged into your desktop machine?

What internal drives do you have? SATA HDD spinner, SATA SSD, M.2 NVMe SSD?

After you are forced to re-boot following a freeze event, have you looked in EVENT viewer (Administrative events initially) to at least look back to see the most recent critical/error/warning things that got reported before the re-boot? Doesn't mean whatever caused your freeze will correspond to something recorded in Event Viewer log, but it's possible something there might be unusual and stand out. Certainly if you do this each time you re-boot after a freeze, you might notice some kind of repeated pattern of events which seem to always be present when a freeze occurs, and this possibly could provide more clues.

Note that if you haven't cleared out the event log you can right now look back at your events records well far into the past, which would certainly cover a number of the recent freezes. For example, you can create a "custom view" (see my screenshot below, from my own freeze situation) looking for critical and error event ids 6008 and 41, which will identify the date/time each of forced manual re-boot following a freeze occurrence. Then you can go back and look at the complete Administrative log just before each of those date/time freeze-reboots, to see what got recorded just before the 6008,41 event sequence.

 

[phoenixmark]

dsperber:
1- I have this desktop and one laptop always running on my lan. Occasionally another laptop, which serves as my audio source for my stereo. The desktop is hardwired, the laptops are on the wireless.
2- For startup programs, norton, aol desktop, sun java update sdtray, garmin express, nvidia nvbackend & shadowplay. These are what show up using WinPatrol.
3- no hardware monitoring programs
4- Logitech mx laser wireless
5-one external usb hard drive that I use for daily for backing up the my documents folder using Karen's Replicator.
6- only 1 internal hard drive- sata ssd
7- When I go into event viewer I get a message: "event log service is unavailable. verify the service is running." I attached two Word documents showing this.

 

[dsperber]

dsperber:
1- I have this desktop and one laptop always running on my lan. Occasionally another laptop, which serves as my audio source for my stereo. The desktop is hardwired, the laptops are on the wireless.
2- For startup programs, norton, aol desktop, sun java update sdtray, garmin express, nvidia nvbackend & shadowplay. These are what show up using WinPatrol.
3- no hardware monitoring programs
4- Logitech mx laser wireless
5-one external usb hard drive that I use for daily for backing up the my documents folder using Karen's Replicator.
6- only 1 internal hard drive- sata ssd
7- When I go into event viewer I get a message: "event log service is unavailable. verify the service is running." I attached two Word documents showing this.

1 - And both the desktop and always-on laptop are both Win7? That's the same as my own situation, but I have two always-on Win7 desktops. And then I have one or two additional Win10 laptops that may occasionally be on.

4 - I too use Logitech Performance MX wireless mice

5 - I too have an external USB drive that I use daily for backups, using both Macrium Reflect (for "system image" backup of Windows C and boot partitions) as well as NovaBACKUP (for folder/file "data" backups)

6 - what is your "power settings" profile (from Personalize -> screen saver -> change power settings)? Are you using "high performance" or "balanced" or some other customized or modified profile values? In particular I'm curious about (a) hard disk, (b) sleep, and (c) processor power management.

7 - for some reason your "Windows Event Log" service isn't running. What version of Win7 are you running? I wonder if Basic or Home doesn't include Windows Event Log service, although it definitely is present in Pro and Enterprise.

Click Start or tap the Windows key and type services in the "search" area but do not hit Enter. Locate Services (identified by the two small gears in its associated icon) which I believe it will be the second item down in the search hit list. You can also select the first item in the search hit list ("component services") but then you'll need to select "Services (local)" on the left when the window opens, in order to see the running Windows services.

Once the Services pane has opened and populated, enlarge the window and spread the columns so that you can see each text area easily. Scroll down the alphabetical list of services and locate "Windows Event Log". Note its current Status (third column) and Startup Type (fourth column). It probably is not running, based on your error message.

Double-click it to get the Properties dialog and on the General tab, change the Startup Type: to Automatic (halfway down) and then click the Start button a little further down.

That should get the Event Log service started. You can close the Services pane. This does not gather messages that occurred when the service was not running but it should start a historical log of new events and the Startup Type: Automatic should ensure that it remains running when you restart the computer.

 

[dsperber]

I now see from your system specs that you are using Win7 Pro. So you should have Windows Event Log service present, or at least available. Even if it's for some reason not been started automatically you dhouls be able to start it and specify "automatic", in your Win7 Pro system.


One more question about your setup... does your desktop machine have one or two monitors connected? Looks like from your specs you only have one. I have two.

 

[phoenixmark]

power settings are high performance with everything set to "never". I have only one monitor. This issue started maybe a month or two ago. I'll try what you suggested when I get home. I'm now on my laptop, not at home, and I can see icons when in event viewer, but they are all the same generic icons on my desktop.

 

[dsperber]

power settings are high performance with everything set to "never".

Just a few things to check here, based on recommendations from the Internet...

USB settings, selective suspend -> disabled
Processor power management, minimum processor state -> 7%

And I've also gone into Device Manager and for all of the USB items which had a "Power Management" tab, I've un-checked the item that "allow the computer to turn off this device to save power".

Note that NOTHING I'VE TRIED HAS SUCCESSFULLY PREVENTED THE FREEZE FOR ME! I've tried zillions of things over the past 8 months, and am currently not running screensaver (so there's no screensaver state to come out of and which might trigger the freeze you are complaining about), all to no avail.

I therefore still have not found what it is about my own Win7 environment which is the "culprit", although I'm almost certain it is the array of 3rd-party software products I run on every machine coupled with the fact that my own two desktop Win7 PC's are HTPC machines (i.e. WMC-enabled, with TV tuner cards inside).

 

[phoenixmark]

Update. It froze again. Was working fine this morning at 6 am when I left for work. Came home tonight at 10:30 and froze at 8:59 (dumb ass me did not take note of am or pm). The screen saver has been turned off and this time it froze showing the desktop. No mouse input or keyboard strokes would do anything. Tried another mouse, a usb plugged directly into the tower, but still nothing. Took a hard reboot to get it to work. I always thought a hard reboot caused a black screen with something to the effect of an unexpected shut down of windows with one of the choices to start windows normally. It booted directly to the desktop as if I did a regular shut down using the "start" button and used the on button to start the computer.

 

[dsperber]

My own freeze symptom continues to attack me as well. I've had screen saver turned off for quite a while, but to no avail. It's not screen saver that is responsible. It's not USB vs. wired mice or keyboard that is responsible.

I've now shut down my ASUS second Win7 network PC (which was also freezing) in order to eliminate network handshakes (and their failure when one machine freezes which eventually causes the other machine to freeze as well). I'm focusing on just getting my new M910t HTPC to stabilize all by itself, but of course this has been going on since last summer without success.

I've also changed my HP 2605dn printer which used to be USB-hosted and shared by ASUS to now just be a network printer available through my router to all desktop and laptop machines on the network. This eliminates printer sharing (which definitely shows up in Windows Event Log of ASUS with error messages as possibly being related to the freeze, even though it seems to still work perfectly).

Latest effort today was to get rid of (a) Team Viewer 14, (b) Malwarebytes Premium 3.7.1, and (c) Microsoft Security Essentials (anti-virus). Instead of (b) and (c) I've now installed BitDefender Total Security. I also use RealVNC for my preferred mode of remote connectivity, so I will limit my Team Viewer usage (if it's needed) to my two Win10 laptops which seem to be completely immune to freezing.

There was a known freeze coming from a recent version of MBAM, which although they claim has been fixed I've decided just to get rid of it. And Team Viewer 14 has a conflict with WMC client extender sessions (which use RDP to the HTPC host server) which didn't exist with version 13 but now exists with version 14, so again I just decided to get rid of it. And although I've used MSE forever on Win7 machines I decided to just go with BitDefender for everything, as long as I was throwing out MBAM.

At the moment the M910t has now been up for 13 hours since the last re-boot, which of course doesn't mean anything but at least is better than freezing. I'm still trying to get back to 100% indefinite 24/7 stability, which I haven't had on any of my own Win7 desktops since last summer. I continue to swap and replace hardware and software, go back to much older versions of drivers and 3rd-party software applications from when I know I "had stability and no freezes", trying to eventually stumble across the one or two things which perhaps are truly responsible for the issue.

So far... no success. But it's only been 8 months now. And I don't want to admit it might be Windows Media Center hardware and software that's at fault (and which therefore cannot be fixed), perhaps somehow connected to the BIOS and Windows updates last year for Sceptre/Meltdown.


Had an interesting issue with a freeze last night, supporting my observation that it's not really Windows that is frozen, but rather just the "human interface devices" like USB mouse and keyboard, as well as output to the screen from some but not all applications (although eventually the whole screen output queue can finally freeze).

I was remotely connected through RealVNC to my cousin's Win10 M920t machine while on the phone with her, working through a problem remotely. I must have been connected and interacting for an hour. When we finally finished and I clicked on the "X" to close the RealVNC window, it didn't close. I was actually now frozen, even though I'd been working without a problem in that window for the past hour.

I then looked at the clock elsewhere on the screen and noticed that it had frozen about 10 minutes earlier. Remarkable. The HID freeze outside of the RealVNC window had occurred 10 minutes earlier, and yet Windows itself for the most part, and the RealVNC application and its own window GUI display, were working fine despite the freeze outside of RealVNC which had continued to run normally and write to the screen window normally. It wasn't until I tried to work outside of RealVNC that the effects of the freeze finally caught up with me, and everything was now locked up with hard re-boot required.

Obviously that had nothing to do with screen saver. And there was no use of WMC for recording or playing back TV, or any extender session involving RDP. Whatever had caused the freeze 10 minutes earlier was something else fundamental within my Win7 system environment.

 

[dsperber]

Well, I am now going to optimistically claim that I have finally and truly SOLVED what was causing my own Win7 HTPC freeze symptom that has been attacking me and my three Win7 HTPC desktop machines for the past 8 months:

I have uninstalled Malwarebytes Premium which WAS THE CULRPIT (and Microsoft Security Essentials, which was the anti-virus I've been using forever). To replace these two protections I have now installed Bitdefender Total Security 2019 on all of my machines (including my Win10 laptops, so that I'm no longer using Malwarebytes Premium anywhere.

I made the decision to try this approach almost 5 days ago, after pretty much exhausting all other possible causes, both internal/external hardware, USB removable devices, human-interface devices like mouse and keyboard, 3rd-party software products, and Windows customizations, all with no effect. The freeze symptom simply continued to randomly occur, anywhere from 1-5 times per day up to maybe letting me go un-frozen for perhaps 1-2 days at best. And the freezes occurred no matter whether the machine was "completely idle" (e.g. in the middle of the night), or whether I was actively using the computer to do something with one or more program windows open.

Five days ago I decided that perhaps the "Win7 freeze" problem with Malwarebytes which was well reported late last year, but which had supposedly been "fixed" by the vendor after a month of deep research into exactly why what they had changed in their software negatively impacted some Win7 systems but not others. They claimed to have finally corrected the defect, and it was now "safe" to install and use their latest version again.

Well, maybe not so much. Maybe they didn't ever have a Windows Media Center HTPC Win7 machine that includes a Ceton TV tuner card (which is controlled using TCPIP-based driver, so it looks like a "network") and a Hauppauge TV tuner card, so they never actually fixed perhaps some other unique bug which applied to this particular kind of Win7 machine to cause a freeze on it. Maybe they fixed the freeze for "simpler" machines, but never fixed the related cause for HTPC machines. I don't know.

I only know that my M910t HTPC has now been up just about 5 days without a freeze, and my Z170 HTPC has now been up about 3 days without a freeze. This has not happened for 8 months. For sure Bitdefender doesn't seem to be causing any new unexpected surprise issues, and appears to be a fine perfectly acceptable anti-virus and anti-malware product. Most importantly, the disappearance of Malwarebytes Premium absolutely appears to have also disappeared the freeze symptom which first appears on my machines late last year, I guess around the same time as the announced freeze defect on Win7 machines running Malwarebytes was first reported by other users.

Furthermore, I have now turned screensaver back on, for both M910t and Z170... AND WITH NO PROBLEMS!! Screensaver works fine, and still no freeze!!!

It obviously was Malwarebytes Premium all along. No failing hardware, no problem with NVidia drivers, no problems with PERFMON or Aida64 or anything else I run. Based on 8 months of experimenting trying to find the culprit, all of these seem to have now been found blameless. It was Malwarebytes Premium who was the culprit.

I know it's only been 5 days of freeze-free operation, on both of my machines, so it might be premature for me to declare victory finally. But this hasn't happened for 8 months, so I am particularly optimistic I have finally emerged victorious.

 

[phoenixmark]

I noticed it too with malwarebytes premium. My other computers are all on malwarebytes free. If I turn off automatic updates and anti ransom ware in premium, no more freeze ups for me either. Luckily, premium is only a 14 day trial. Anytime from now on when it gives me a free trial of premium, I know to go into the settings and turn them off.

Glad you fund the cause for your issues. I just don't have the skills to dig that deep into computers.

Marm

 

[dsperber]

Final closure on this problem.

Rather than duplicate what's already been posted in one of the other threads on this forum that is also concerned about the "freeze" symptom, please read THIS LATEST POST OF MINE to learn the details of the final solution.

The answer was, indeed, an engineering design potential conflict with how Malwarebytes works vs. how the CBT technology in Macrium Reflect works, in a Win7 environment. So if you use both products on your Win7 system then potentially this "freeze" might have occurred. Some Win7 systems were more susceptible and vulnerable than others, but there really is no guarantee the freeze would or would not occur.

Bottom line: if you are using both MBAM and Macrium Reflect on your Win7 system, you should be sure and update Macrium Reflect when the next version is released sometime in the next few weeks, as it will contain the corrected MRCBT.SYS driver which is critically crucial in completely eliminating any future freeze possibility on Win7 systems.