This used to happen once every few days but now it happens several times a day, and I can’t figure out what’s causing it. At apparently random times, Blender will suddenly slow down incredibly, along with the rest of the computer (except the mouse cursor which moves normally). I can still press keys and click things but the computer takes 5-30 seconds to respond to each action.
I have an AMD Athlon 2000+, 512mb DDR-RAM, ATI Radeon 7000 64mb, and Windows XP Pro. I am using Blender 2.4. I never had this problem in 2.37.
What I’ve been doing is pressing Control-Alt-Delete, waiting for the Task Manager to come up, clicking on Blender’s process (which always shows 99% CPU usage), waiting for it to actually highlight, and then clicking End Task, waiting for the confirmation window, and then clicking yes. Within five seconds of clicking yes in the confirmation window Blender closes and everything returns to normal, but getting to that window takes as long as two minutes. It’s extremely annoying and has almost cost me my work several times.
I can’t figure out a solid pattern but some things are similar between the freezes. It always happens while I’m doing something with the mouse - clicking, using the scroll wheel, or just moving the cursor around. It happens half of the time in the file navigation windows (usually Open File) and half of the time while working. I’ve never lost more than a minute of work to it because when it happens while I’m working it’s usually shortly after saving.