Windows 7 Windows' "brain aneurysms".

[The Frederick]

I honestly can't think of another way to describe these. What happens is that I'll be using Firefox, and then it stops responding. So then I'll type something on MSN and that stops responding. Then I drop to the desktop and try to right-click, and the desktop stops responding. I then click the Start button and the taskbar stops responding.

At that point, I can't do anything but wait for everything to respond, and it usually takes something like 10 mins. Through the whole thing, my sidebar gadget is telling me that CPU usage is close to nil and RAM usage is only around 40%.

Anybody else seen anything like this?

 

[Trouble]

Haven't actually seen anything identical but I would suggest running
chkdsk c: /r
and letting it finish all five stages and see what it reports back (you'll get a prompt something to the effect that it can't lock the volume, just respond with a y hit enter and reboot the machine)
then a manual defrag, maybe even a couple times
And if the problem persists, then maybe we can assume that the desktop gadget information has also stopped responding and is erroneous

 

[The Frederick]

Haven't actually seen anything identical but I would suggest running
chkdsk c: /r
and letting it finish all five stages and see what it reports back (you'll get a prompt something to the effect that it can't lock the volume, just respond with a y hit enter and reboot the machine)
then a manual defrag, maybe even a couple times

I'll give that a try.

And if the problem persists, then maybe we can assume that the desktop gadget information has also stopped responding and is erroneous

Thing is, I can see it working, it's still animated. The only things that stop responding are the things that I try to use.