I know it’s unlikely that any if you guys will have exactly the same problem as I had but I thought I would document it here anyway as it is always useful to remember that sometimes you have to be quite brutal with your system to find the source of a problem.
I have been running my Vista box quite happily for several months making sure I have taken images regularly and certainly after any major changes. As Vista compatible products have started maturing it seemed that I had pretty much got all the functionality that I had with XP and life was good 😉
Then a couple of weeks ago I treated myself to a new M$ wireless desktop setup (Natural 7000). Everything worked straight out of the box and the mouse and keyboard are an absolute pleasure to use. However it didn’t take long for the pleasure to dissipate.
About a day or so later I noticed that I was getting the odd stutter from the mouse pointer and then it would freeze for a few seconds. Then I stated to get really mad when I was getting hangs a few minutes after booting.
So I rolled back the system drive a couple of days and things seemed better, but after a few hours the same things started happening again. I spent a lot of time trying to trace the problem down. I looked at and changed keyboard and mouse driver versions (even though the latest were already installed for my old set-up). I looked at radio interference from my wireless phone and other electronics in the vicinity. None of these seemed to show anything significant.
It would have been easy to blame the hardware, I would have sent it back except firstly I didn’t want to let the problem beat me and secondly it was so comfortable to use! I started to suspect that it had something to do with the BBC iPlayer as the problem seemed to get worse after I installed this, however even with this uninstalled it was not cured. Then by chance I happened to read that my AV program had just done badly in lab tests and decided to try something else.
Over the next day or two I removed my current Anti Virus, Anti Spyware and Software Firewall and tried them in combinations with other products. During this time I noticed that sometimes the mouse problem was improving! In the end I ditched Avast AV, Spyware Doctor (Google Version) and PC Tools Firewall. With all these gone the ‘hardware’ problem disappeared. I replaced the lot with Kapsersky Internet Suite, reinstalled iPlayer and everything is hunky dory.
I had absolutely no reason to suspect that these programs were causing the problem and it was pretty much by chance I discovered and cured it. After all they were all working perfectly until I added the hardware. I had made up my mind to address the issue when SP1 appeared by installing from fresh and trying to track it that way, luckily I have solved the issue slightly less painfully!
Anyone else had problems caused for obscure reasons?
