Computer freezes randomly

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
1

Since between mid and late January, I have often had incidents where the screen will freeze and mouse/keyboard stop working. I use Vista x64 and Avast 7.0.1474.

It can occur as early as 7-8 minutes in a session and as late as 45-50 minutes. Once I have passed 50 minutes without the computer freezing, it seems it won’t occur at all – at least I haven’t experienced it yet.

It has happened while playing a game, while looking at a Wikipedia page with no fancy graphics or anything, and while checking my webmail.

The screen will freeze completely – if I’m playing a real-time game, it will freeze an exact picture frame, for instance. Music and sounds will keep playing indicating that the game or program itself hasn’t crashed. But I can’t use the mouse or keyboard, none of the usual keyboard combinations will do anything. I can only do a hard reboot.

It can happen repeatedly in multiple successive sessions the same day, or with a week between the incidents.

I have turned on and checked Avast shield logs, and there doesn’t seem to be any malicious activity, or indeed much activity at all, going on when the freezes happen. However, if a webpage freezes instantly upon loading it in the browser, I can see from the web shield log that it will continue to load the remaining pictures and such, so again as with the continued music, I think this indicates that the computer doesn’t actually crash, it’s just the output and input devices (except the headphones) which stop working.

I had problems some time ago with overheating, but back then the screen wouldn’t freeze, it would just go dark.

I’m posting this here initially because I suspect it could be either malware or Avast related. The freezes started happening shortly after I had reinstalled Avast without using the special uninstallation program, and I’ve read this can cause issues with keyboard and mouse not working (not randomly as in my case, however).

2

I know bumping a thread is bad manners, but maybe I forgot to state the obvious, that I of course would be very grateful if someone could help, whether by directly answering, directing me to another Avast board or indeed to another forum on the web dealing with technical issues.

I’m posting here to begin with because I’ve seen mention of bad uninstalls of Avast causing keyboard/mouse issues, and because a quick search revealed previous discussions about random freezes relating to “corrupted USB-ports” (which is a bit cryptic to me) on Avast boards. Also, of course, because of the possibility that it is caused by malware.

3

Have you tried doing a clean install to see if that makes a difference ?
This might help:
Successfully Installing avast!

4

Have you taken a look at Event Viewer to see if there is an explanation? Have you run a chkdsk to see if you have any drive issues? Have you run taskmanager to see if anything is doing lots of I/O or is hogging the CPU?

5

This may or may not be an avast related problem, but if you Google" Vista freezes" you will find pages and pages of comments and suggested fixes.

6

Thanks, I’ll have a look at it.

I’m sure that’s very helpful, unfortunately I’m just not very technically literate! :-[
I’ll try to do some searches on these terms; if you feel like it, I would also appreciate if you could direct to me some quick overview/guide about using these functions.

I see. But wouldn’t there be a lot of pages on similar searches on freezes in XP/Win7/Win8, or is Vista recognized to be especially prone to freezes?

By the way, I just looked at my chest log and noticed something odd. Usually it will look like this:
17.17.18 chest start
17.25.01 chest stop

But then after one of the hard reboots it started looking like this for every session:
17.27.28 chest start
17.27.28 XMLException 27 (could not load message) in chestServInit
17.27.28 Error 13 in chestStart
17.27.28 chest stop
17.50.44 chest stop

Is the chest actually still functional? If not, what could be the cause of the malfunction?

7

Please do a clean install. It isn’t as hard as it sounds and may very well solve all your problems. :slight_smile:

8

Vista is especially prone to freezes.

9

This procedure I’ve had recommended is slightly different, would it be sufficient?:

So, just to get it out of the way (sort of): Could freezes of the nature I have described be caused by malware, and/or is it unlikely that malware would manifest itself in this way?

With regards to the chest logs, what I find odd and slightly disturbing is that the chest log errors started appeared after a hard boot which also mysteriously caused the automatic reinstallation of several USB drivers. This reminds me of the recently discovered and patched security flaw in Microsoft with USB drivers, however this was some days before I applied the patch (kb2807986) as it was initially checked off. I have located the driver installation log files in case anyone thinks there could be something to it and the logs could provide answers.

10

To state the obvious - your guess is as good as mine. LOL However … Having said that - I would also run some hardware tests, probably before doing anything else. I suggest you test the hard drive by downloading the manufacturers diagnostic and running it. I suggest you test your RAM overnight by downloading the latest version of memtest from http://www.memtest.org/

Both should be available as a downloadable iso file for burning to a CDROM that should self boot!

If you do that at least you will be re-assured your hardware is OK - at least apart from the motherboard. In my experience freezes are caused by bad hardware as much as bad software.

11

It could also be a rootkit which may be controlling your computer and does what it wants.
Not allowing you access since it’s busy doing it chores.
You can eliminate that possibility by following the directions outlined at:
http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=53253.0
and then attaching your log results here.
One of the trained Malware experts would then be able to help you.

A video of a clean install of avast is available at:
http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=93544.msg915130#msg915130

12

Hmm, I guess I was hoping malware would behave differently. That it wouldn’t need to resort to freezing my computer and such. But maybe I’ll have to go through that guide just to be sure. By the way - many of the links in that guide are to sites I’ve never heard of, are the files absolutely safe, also from a technical perspective?

13

Avast and Singular Labs are safe sites. What other links are you referring too ???

14

Well, for instance, when I just looked up both general-changelog-team.fr and itxassociates.com on virustotal.com, both sites were listed as malicious by some of the scanners.

And when I tried to download aswMBR.exe on another computer so I could perhaps copy it to a CD, the local av-program decided it was malware. Now, I don’t think Avast releases malware but perhaps it could indicate further technical issues if nothing else.

15

Where are you getting the sites you’re listing (general-changelog etc and itx… ) They aren’t on the instructions I made available.

16

I’m sorry, I should have specified I meant the sites linked to in the guide “Logs to assist in cleaning malware”.

17

I’m also getting this error in the log when opening the chest from the Avast UI:

Error 1753 chestOpenListRpc

With regards to the instruction for posting logs you directed me to, my main concern was that the programs listed, OTL.exe, Adwcleaner.exe and so on, could cause technical issues. I’m also a bit concerned about posting logs possibly containing some sensitive personal information, and giving other people, even trusted malware removal experts, access to my computer.

18

They don’t have access to your computer but give you instructions on how you can clean up
your computer with their guidance.
You’re the only one that does anything on your computer.
The programs used are tools and are perfectly safe if used as directed.