Hi, Bob.
There are many possible causes for this kind of hang. One is that WinXP may
be having trouble reading from your hard drive. You may have loose or
defective cables, or the drive itself may be going bad, forcing Windows to
try again and again to read the sector to load the program or data.
Of the many other possibilities, most are hardware related: heat buildup,
bad ram, loose connectors - or incorrect device drivers, which are the
bridges between hardware and software.
To be sure that the problem is not within Windows itself, you can try a
couple of steps. First, run the System File Checker by typing at the Run
prompt: sfc /scannow
SFC will compare each WinXP operating system file with the "known good" copy
held in your on-disk cache and replace any missing or damaged ones. Have
your WinXP CD-ROM handy; SFC will probably want to see that.
If the problem persists, and you've eliminated hardware as the cause, then
you may need to reinstall WinXP by doing what MS calls an in-place upgrade,
as described here:
How to Perform an In-Place Upgrade (Reinstallation) of Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;en-us;q315341
This will take nearly as long as a fresh install, but you should be up and
running again in less than half a day.
Before going to this step, you might want to uninstall the offending program
and then reinstall it. But you indicated that it happens without regard to
which program is running, so I suggested the other approach.
RC
