Sporadic issue with programs not launching after restart

[franko75]

Hi, every now and then my work PC restarts itself over night and when I come into work in the morning and find this. Every time this happens, the bulk of my programs won't launch - apart from IE, file explorer and native applications like the Task Manager. It's very strange - I try to launch an application, it attempts to load then seems to die, although in the task manager I can always see each instance of the program I've tried to start, with very low memory footprint.

This has just happened to me again this morning, and after an hour or so of rebooting, eventually the applications have started working again, without any change having been made by me. I have run a defrag and disk check and also updated Windows 7 with all available updates, but the issue remains. I also switched the firewall off and still had the same problem.

Anyone have any idea what might be going on?

 

[TVeblen]

Is this system being left on and running overnight, or is it put into Standby or Hibernation?
What happens if you Shut Down (off), wait about 30 seconds, and then Start fresh? Any change to the behavior?

Most likely you are experiencing stop errors that result in a bluescreen message and the computer automatically restarts afterwards. Since no one is there you can't see this happening.
You can go to the Event Viewer to see a list of Critical Errors logged by the machine. Post the info here and someone will tell you what the codes mean. (Start > type: Event Viewer in the search box).
If there are bluescreen stops and critical errors then the system will have logged minidumps that can also be analyzed. (in the Crashes & Debugging forum)
You could stop Windows from restarting when there is a bluescreen so you can see and record the error code, but if no one is there that is less than useful.

The most common causes of bluescreen errors:

• Memory issues
• Overheating
• Bad device drivers
• Bad motherboard
• Bad Power supply

And there can be combinations too (overheating can lead to memory errors).

Try and find and give us more information about these restarts and we can take it from there. Filling out your system specs would help a lot too.