[ this was also posted in the bug referenced early on page 1 of this
topic - supplimental text added here ]

It is very difficult to diagnose this type of problem without more
detailed data.  It seems like those experiencing the problems are
primarly on Windows.  Data such as which task is hogging the CPU, how
many page faults are occuring, and by which task, etc. would be
invaluable.

Without that data, I'm going to play a hunch.

I don't know if this issue has been resolve for you folks or not, but
this behaviour seems very much like something I've seen with
particularly agressive virus scanners such as Kaspersky and a couple of
others.  I might be way off base with this diagnosis in this case, but
the information below might be useful for others in the future if I've
misdiagnosed in this case.

The reports here don't seem to indicate which tasks are actually
hogging the CPU times, causing large numbers of page faults, doing
large quantities of I/O, etc.  This would be key information.  Large
VMs don't mean very much, as that's not the same as increasing
consumption of memory, which does matter (ie. leak).

Some virus scanners when set on more agressive modes perform a checksum
on each file, and store that checksum and other information in an
additional "stream" of the file.  The goal is that the virus scanner
can compare the checksum information in its database with that in the
new stream of the file more quickly than re-performing the checksum
itself (esp. for large files).  For database files that change
constantly (ie. slims music database), and tagged music files, this
agressive virus scanning performs horribly, and the system spends all
its time doing disk I/O and checksum calculations, leaving nothing for
other apps.  The result, users experience long hangs or stalls, and the
system is unusable.

Reducing the agressiveness of these scanners helps resolve the problem
with no loss of security.

For those of you who don't know how to see this information, you can
add many more very useful pieces of data to your Windows task manager. 
Under the Processes tab, open View->Select Columns and add all the
possible columns.  For your Performance tab, be sure to enable
View->Show kernel times as well.  During  the times when the system
seems wedged, watch and sort by the columns that show most activity.


-- 
MrC
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