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I've been having a weird issue with Windows 10 ever since I installed it early this year.

My issue is that my system "pseudofreezes". It's not really frozen: I can move the mouse, hover on things and have tool tips displayed; apps that are already open are responsive, but I can't open any other apps. Rebooting doesn't work, and I normally wind up hard resetting, though sometimes the problem resolves itself and everything goes back to normal.

Pseudofreeze seems to happen shortly after booting, though not during it. Everything that's supposed to load on boot does so with no problems. I don't think I've ever seen a pseudofreeze happen much later after booting. Typically, I notice my system is pseudofrozen while I'm using Chrome.

The most common way I notice pseudofreeze is happening is that I open a new Chrome tab and it's completely blank. Existing tabs look fine and can be scrolled normally, except if they need to load stuff often (e.g. twitter feed), in which case the content never loads and the wheel spins forever. Also, clicking links will lead nowhere. Generally, accessing the task manager during a pseudofreeze is impossible, but in those rare cases when it did open, I could see that system interrupts where using 100% of the processor.

I did some research on the Internet and found out that I'm not the only one with this issue. I can't find the post right now, but there was a guy with the exact same issue who claimed he talked to a Microsoft support person who said it was a user account problem and recommended to create a new one. The guy did so and allegedly solved his problem. I did it too, about a week ago, and I got a pseudofreeze both yesterday and today. It may be an odd coincidence, but I think it happens most frequently, if not only, on weekends.

I'm pretty sure I've had pseudofreezes happen before launching Chrome (eg I was unable to launch other apps before I tried to launch Chrome), so I'd tend to think it's not Chrome's fault. Besides, I launch Chrome pretty soon after boot, so it might simply be that Chrome is affected by the pseudofreeze because as said it only happens after booting and never again during the entire day.

Other things I tried:

  • sfc /scannow: I do that regularly. I've had the pseudofreezes whether or not sfc found issues, and they were always resolved anyway.
  • DISM: ditto.
  • Updating graphics card drivers: no use.
  • Scan disk: no errors.
  • Checking Windows logs: the only odd thing I can see is an audit failure that happens often, even well past the pseudofreeze. The log says:

Code integrity determined that the image hash of a file is not valid. The file could be corrupt due to unauthorized modification or the invalid hash could indicate a potential disk device error.

File Name: \Device\HarddiskVolume1\Windows\System32\guard64.dll

That's the message in the overwhelming majority of the cases. In one instance the file name was different.

  • AV and malware scan: I do that regularly. Nothing there.

My installation of Windows 10 is a fresh one, ie it's not installed on top of previous OSs. (I had upgraded Windows 7 to Windows 10 at a point and it was godawful. Wound up wiping my hard drive and reinstall afresh. As a side note, nothing like this ever happened on Windows 7.)

I update Windows regularly, whenever I am asked to.

When pseudofreeze happens, there doesn't seem to be any special disk activity. The disk LED is normally off. Also, CPU temperature is normal.

I'm well above the minimum specs for Windows 10: AMD FX-8350 4.0GHz, 8 cores; MSI GeForce 1050 Ti 4GB; 16GB RAM; SSD 120GB.

I am not having any other issues except pseudofreeze. No system crashes, no normal freezes, no BSODs, nothing.

Any idea what this might be about?

Nicola
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  • Hi, follow the steps from my comment [here](https://superuser.com/questions/1308563/why-do-large-downloads-bring-my-pc-to-a-halt/1309429#comment1945888_1308563). After you got the freeze and 100% interrupts, go back to cmd and stop logging. With this file I can see what is wrong – magicandre1981 May 30 '20 at 07:46
  • High interrupts usually denote a hardware issue, whatever that is. In your case, I'd go for defective RAM and/or VRAM, a bad graphics driver, maybe. Have you considered disabling pagefile entirely, just to eliminate the possibility of disk write issues? –  May 30 '20 at 07:58
  • @magicandre1981 I can try, though I don't know when I'll get the file, since the pseudofreeze happens after boot about once a week. I can't trigger it, so I will essentially have to try this every day until it happens. – Nicola May 30 '20 at 08:22
  • ok, replace the 60 with -1 in the command to let it run for hours, it will internally override old unimportant data – magicandre1981 May 30 '20 at 08:24
  • @magicandre1981 This morning I ran the command right after boot and let it go. Few minutes later I got a pseudofreeze so bad that the entire screen went blank and had to hard reset. After my PC booted up again, the command had created no file. I don't know why. Other times I tried the command when there was no pseudofreeze, the command had created a file and a folder even before I stopped it. – Nicola Jun 02 '20 at 05:37
  • When you reboot the PC, the logger is no longer running. And as I said replace 60 with - 1 in command, 60 means 60s and - 1 is endless. If you have black screen you mave have GPU issues. Update GPU driver and you cam try to disable hw acceleration in chrome options – magicandre1981 Jun 02 '20 at 06:19
  • @magicandre1981 Yes, I know. I couldn't stop the logger because everything was frozen this time. I did set it to run endlessly, and it ran for several minutes before the freeze occurred, yet no file was created, unlike previous times when it created rather larger files (hundreds of megs) even before I stopped it. The screen went blue, not black, but it wasn't a BSOD. It was more like explorer died, with the mouse pointer still working. I doubt it's GPU-related but I'll update the drivers anyway. I disabled chrome hw acceleration, good idea. It caused me other issues in the past. – Nicola Jun 02 '20 at 07:29
  • when explorer is gone, try CTRL+ALT+DEL to open taskmgr and here select the cmd and click "switch to" to show cmd – magicandre1981 Jun 02 '20 at 14:13
  • @magicandre1981 When that happens, the computer is entirely unresponsive. Except moving the mouse, nothing works, including CTRL+ALT+DEL. By the way, neither Chrome's hw acceleration nor the graphics drivers are the culprit. I disabled the former and upgraded the latter, and this morning I got another pseudofreeze. This time it resolved itself and I didn't have to reset, but it happened before I could launch the logger. – Nicola Jun 03 '20 at 05:32
  • You need to launch the logger before and let it run all time. What have you done to to resolve it? When you have the freeze, press CAPS LOCK ley and look if status light toggles – magicandre1981 Jun 03 '20 at 05:40
  • There's no reason to run it all day, because the pseudofreeze never, ever, happens much later than boot in the morning. I've never seen it happen during the day. If it doesn't occur within the first 10 mins from boot or so, it never will. This morning I just forgot to launch the logger right away after boot. I did nothing to solve it. I was doing stuff in Chrome when it happened: I opened a new tab and it was fully blank. Then I tried to open other folders and stuff, and nothing happened. Then, suddenly, the freeze was gone and all those things opened at once. – Nicola Jun 03 '20 at 06:13
  • in this case you need to capture a boot trace each boot (**"C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\Windows Performance Toolkit\xbootmgr.exe" -trace boot -traceFlags Latency -stackwalk profile -postBootDelay 600**) this captures 10minutes after boot. xbootmgr is part of [Windows 10 SDK / Windows Performance toolkit](https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/downloads/windows-10-sdk/) – magicandre1981 Jun 03 '20 at 13:02
  • Okay, I got xbootmgr. Do I need to schedule/run it manually at each boot, or will the command you specified take care of scheduling it at boot until further notice? – Nicola Jun 03 '20 at 14:24
  • it will reboot system. so boot system, directly run the command and it will reboot windows and hopefully capture the hang after windows booted to desktop. – magicandre1981 Jun 03 '20 at 14:55
  • @magicandre1981 I had no luck with the boot tracer yet, but I did manage to capture two pseudofreezes with the logger. The first one was short and unusual, but the second one was a proper pseudofreeze. I have all the files on Google drive. Can I PM you the link? – Nicola Jun 06 '20 at 09:10
  • I created a file request for you: https://www.dropbox.com/request/87hdmhzCQMpnPH6cjnZk. Upload the zipped file – magicandre1981 Jun 06 '20 at 09:26
  • Okay, done! Thanks. – Nicola Jun 06 '20 at 17:52
  • I don't see a large spike/hang. but I see you use an really old realtek NIC driver and interaction with COMODO av/firewall (guard64.dll, inspect.sys). so update the driver and the AV suite – magicandre1981 Jun 06 '20 at 19:22
  • Done. Thanks. Do you think this might be connected to the pseudofreeze? – Nicola Jun 07 '20 at 05:28
  • possible. you used the driver that came with windows 10. I also see you have application crashes/hangs because I see several instances of WerFault.exe in the trace. – magicandre1981 Jun 07 '20 at 13:27

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I think magicandre1981 was correct. After updating the NIC driver, I haven't had a pseudofreeze in over two weeks and I doubt I'll have one again. Thanks to magicandre1981 for solving this!

Nicola
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