Blender is acting very strange. Windows XP Home Sp2

Support Basics & Interface
#1

Okay, I have been using Blender for over a year, since 2.42a. I download every new version as soon as is is announced (or before ;)); this includes 2.45. So the below I do not think is related to graphics cards or incompatibility, It just appeared out of the blue.

Last night, I tried to open Blender via start menu and CPU just went up to 50%, and then windows just froze (this has never happened to me before, sure, windows crashes a lot, but I have never seen it freeze). I couldn’t do anything so I forced quit.

Upon restart, I tried opening the various other builds of blender (all graphicall) on my machine, all opened without a hitch. Then I tried to open the official release via command prompt… not to open it even, just to see if I could access the -h help text. Nothing appeared, no errors, no help text, just windows froze.

This morning I completely reinstalled Blender and what do you know, it works perfectly. So I go off to school, and I come back at around noon (we have short days this week), login, and then try to open blender. Windows freezes.

Now I cannot fix it :(. Even freshly unzipped downloaded Blender doesn’t work. I scanned and repaired the registry, reinstalled again, no cigars.

I’m stumped :confused:. If anyone has any ideas, I would greatly appreciate it if you helped me.
In the mean time, I can use some SVN builds instead.

#2

Have you tried using an anti-virus package? This was the last resort for me and it worked!

#3

I’ll scan now.

Nope, no viruses.

#4

Okay, it seems to have been fixed, for now. I tried my sister’s blender in her account and it worked perfectly, so I copied to mine and tried it and it didn’t work, but I left the computer alone for like 10 minutes, and it opened. Every initiation after that worked without a hitch, and it still works now.

#5

That doesn’t sound like a problem with Blender. You may want really check your system with more than just a virus scan.

Also, I rarely experience crashes on my XP system. I used to experience a lot of performance issues because I used to always put my computer into Hibernate mode instead of shutting it down completely. There used to be weeks between actual shutdowns. Over time, I would start to experience problems similar to what you are describing so, if you frequently use the Hibernate feature this might be part of the problem.

#6

I just don’t ever power down my system in any way and I notice hefty programs getting laggy after a few weeks.

OTOH, it’s hard to tell if that’s inherent or has more to do with say, crashing wxpython development stuff 5000 times one week or playing the Sims a lot for a while or something that could be glitchy and leaky.