Re: Odd behavior - computer locks up momentarily when starting ANY game

I followed this thread and one suggestion I have not seen is this: disable your AV and Firewall one at a time and try to play. Mind you, don't do this when you are connected to the net.

RP wrote:
I can't figure this one out. Every time *without fail*, when I start up
ANY game,. everything will be fine until about two minutes into the
game when suddenly my mouse will freeze and I'll hear the sound for a
few seconds, and then the sound will stop also, and the whole machine
appears to be locked up. Things stay like this for about 10-20 seconds,
and then suddenly it all frees up and I'm good to go. Then, shortly
after this, the whole series repeats itself. After these two sequences,
everything works fine and it doesn't happen again and I can play all
night without incident. However, if I quit the game and restart it, the
same thing will happen again shortly and I'll have to go through the
two sequences again before things settle down.

This is happening on a fresh system after nuking and reinstalling XP
Pro. Latest nVidia drivers for my 6800 Ultra and XiFi, 3.2ghz P4 with
3GB and plenty of storage. Networked with a few other machines on a
small home LAN. Very clean system and LAN, but something is obviously
wrong. I suspect it's either a firewall issue or some kind of bad
interaction with DirectX (since it's only games that appear to be
affected).

It's a Windows Server 2003 domain with Active Directory and an Exchange
2003 server on the LAN.

Any ideas? This is driving me NUTS. It used to happen before I nuked
and reformatted, and I thought this would get rid of the issue. But
apparently not.

.

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