SUMMARY Some of our Windows 7 PCs are going into a partial machine hang condition (locked up/not responding/wedged/etc). It's intermittent, with no trigger or pattern I have been able to discern. Definitely a persistent, repeating problem, though. It seems to be related to the Microsoft networking (SMB) layer. I'm wondering if there is anything that can help me try and narrow down the cause.
Ideally, I'm hoping for logging options, or something like Driver Verifier. Failing that, is there a way to force a bugcheck so I can get a kernel dump and examine what the system was doing when it went into extreme-navel-gazing mode? Better ideas welcomed. GORY DETAILS Only effecting a handful of people, as far as I know. One of them is me. Different users, PCs, PC models, user job roles, software usage, locations within the building. Some of the PCs are less than a year old, some are up to ~4 years old. At least one of the PCs (mine) is on a UPS. All effected PCs are Dell, running Windows 7 64-bit with latest updates. All had OS installed from our WDS server. All had other software installed from the same server as all other PCs. Should be a relative homogeneous environment, although we have a lot of one-off apps that only a few people run, some of which are in the effected population (but nothing common to all of them). Only effecting Windows 7 PCs. Seems to have started with our migration to Win 7 (from XP), which we started at the beginning of this year. It's almost all Win 7 PCs now. So the question, "Has anything changed recently?" is unfortunately answered with "Yes, almost everything". :-/ New OS version, all new installs, different drivers, new MS Office version, in some cases other new app versions too. Hasn't hit any XP machines. ;-) Since I'm one of the effected users, I can provide some first-hand observations. The first symptom I see always seems to be in association with network activity. Reading or writing a file on a server, or browsing a folder (reading directory) on a server. The program I'm using will just hang. For GUI, generally a total app hang, entire app window gets grayed out, title changes to include "(Not responding)". For command prompt windows, the command I'm running will hang and never come back. Once this happens, the rest of the system quickly grinds to a halt. It seems like at some point, the network just dies, and anything that tries to use networking is dragged down with it. Since most everything uses the network to some degree, it doesn't take long for the machine to become unusable. As soon as Windows Explorer/shell touches anything network, it hangs too, and from there there's not much one can do. But, it's only killing things using Microsoft networking. Just now, when it happened again, I happened to have a PuTTY window open, connected via SSH to a Linux box, and that kept working dandy. At least a couple other apps were hung (one was Excel), but as long as I didn't touch Explorer, the PuTTY window kept working. I can also ping the effected PC from other PCs. "NET VIEW" against the dying PC returns "Network path not found" (code 53). PSLIST does similar. Using Samba tools from a Linux box, "nmblookup -S" (NetBIOS node status) can get the PC's name list. But "smbclient -L" (list shares) returns an error to the effect of the connection failed. (I was a bad admin, and didn't write down the exact message.) The mouse pointer has remained responsive, as have the CAPS/NUM LOCK keys on the keyboard. Sometimes the system will beep/chirp when I try to type. At least once I've had a Process Explorer window open, and when the system hung, I didn't see anything obvious in any of the graphs, e.g., no CPU or memory spikes. Unfortunately it seems like Process Explorer (and Task Manager) get caught up in whatever happens, so I haven't been able to use them to examine the hung system in any detail. -- Ben
