If they are REAL ATI cards, then go to ATI.com to get the latest and greatest drivers for the particular model of card you are using. BUILT BY ATI or are they knock-off ATI cards built by some other company using ATI's chipset technologies ? Have your system always been like this? When did you first notice it?Īre the ATI video cards that you have tried 'REAL' ATI, i.e. I would expect more fireworks if this was a hardware issue such as memory or PSU, but you never know. Same hardware, right? At what point did you notice it with your fresh XP install? Any difference running with antivirus and firewall apps switched off? (and it will quickly unstick - MS did raise the limit to 18000 user handles in 32-bit SP2 (it's much higher in 64-bit), which will be far from fast to clean up, but you have to hack the registry to have the limit raised)īut if you had this with Win2k and now with XP. I don't think it will service ctrl-alt-del at this point though. At this point Windows will deallocate the created windows and do nothing else visually for a noticable amount of time. I know of only one way of freezing windows: Allocate 10000 user handles (CreateWindow() in a loop will suffice) and then bail. Perhaps running with the task manager on top might give reveal if a process spends all CPU or something.

Click to expand.Well, if ctrl-alt-del does anything, then generally ctrl-shift-esc should work too.

Task manager freezing windows 10