Various programs "not responding" - Vista noob needs help

[pkiff]

I recently acquired a used X60 Tablet with Vista Business. I love the X60 hardware, but am struggling with Vista. In fact, I am close to giving up on it and trying XP Tablet edition instead. But I'm guessing that my problem is not so much with Vista: it's more likely that I've just screwed something up somewhere or I've got a bum hard disk or a bad recovery image or something. I know XP/2000/98SE pretty much inside and out, but haven't spent any time with Vista before and need some basic pointers about where to start troubleshooting.

I've already used rescue and recovery to return to a factory install...twice. Though I don't have the original hard drive nor do I have recovery disks nor can I make recovery disks. It has occurred to me that maybe my recovery partition has some kind of imaging flaw as it was cloned over from the original disk (not by me), but the recovery process itself seems to work exactly as advertised, and everything comes out seeming to work the way it should.

My problems occur after I've installed critical and important Vista updates using Windows update, Office 2007, Firefox, and a couple other selected Lenovo updates that appear in the driver matrix for the X60. More recently, and possibly more importantly, I also recently had some kind of Thinkpad active protection or sensor protection incident, which I'm not sure I properly recovered from.

Current symptoms:
- frequently will be unable to complete logging off, and the machine will just sit there at the logging off screen forever
- several different programs are acting up and will periodically crash, giving a "not responding" error, this includes the Sidebar, Access Connections, and Excel 2007
- other programs seem to run just fine, including Firefox
- hard drive constantly trying to do something, and I can't figure out what, even though I've disabled the indexing thingy
- as of right now, I can't get the "Task Manager" window to appear, though it appears in the system tray

I'm happy to go through another Recovery process and wipe the disk again if that will get things working - at this point I have no data at all on the disk and am still just trying to get the X60 set up and configured the way I want. But is there anything I should try first? Reinstall some of the updates? Reinstall Office? Run some hardware test? If I had a great deal of patience, I am sure I would do all these things, but I'm kind of frustrated with my Vista experience so far and doubt that my patience will last more than a couple tests or one more recovery process.

Thanks,

Phil.

[mgo]

l.

"I also recently had some kind of Thinkpad active protection or sensor protection incident, which I'm not sure I properly recovered from"

It is possible that the hard drive was jostled severely, since you mentioned the Active Protection item.

Perhaps you could run chkdsk c: /f from the command prompt (using run as admin-the right click) and see if that helps.

chkdsk does not give the user any feedback as it runs in Vista, like it did in XP, so you will be kept in the dark while it runs before bootup.

[pkiff]

Thanks for the advice mgo.

I'm not sure what happened, but my system now seems to be recovered from most of the symptoms I listed. I did in fact run the disk check as you suggested, but before doing that the system downloaded and installed a bunch of updates (13 at once). After installing all those, the system appeared to be able to boot and logoff without problems and my task manager was working again. I don't know what the updates were or which software they were associated with, but it occurs to me that maybe my problems came from some kind of Internet connectivity issue that caused some updates to not complete earlier or to be corrupted or something. I did experience some problems with Access Connections that affected my wifi connections.

I checked a couple other items and apparently the ThinkVantage Active Protection thinks everything is fine right now, and the hard disk itself isn't flagged as "dirty".

I'm not sure where to look to figure out what might have been fixed, or to figure out if chkdsk helped or not.

I have some other issues that seem related to an improper install of one or more Lenovo ThinkVantage products. How this could have come about is also a mystery to me since I've only installed recommended updates to things. But I'll post about these in a new thread.

Thanks again,

Phil.

[Marin85]

Hi,
glad that Vista has finally worked out for you (more or less) Somewhere under Windows Update you should be able to find all the updates history (sorry, don´t remember the exact location in Vista), and from there on you could find out what issues have been addressed by which update. You may have had some compatibility issues, maybe including some of the Lenovo software, which - depending on what Lenovo programs you have installed - could explain the logging-off issues (Client Security Solution, System Update and R&R have always been the usual suspects for me... ). BTW, even with Indexing disabled, Vista relatively often exhibits higher HD activity due to its prefetch/superfetch functionality (in my observation it does more I/Os than indexing), so don´t worry about it, it´s normal for Vista. For that matter, I found indexing quite fine as long as one doesn´t let it index removable storage...

Cheers,

Marin