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[PsyberianHusky]

Hey its Tech support time I am having a minor problem with my taskbar freezing up for a little bit when I alt-tab out of games,
for 15 maybe 20 seconds, If I touch it it locks up more and I get a windows explorer crash.
Right now it maybe just a minor inconvenience, but I hate things going wrong and not knowing what is causing them.

Does Bay 12 have any idea what could be going on?
Maybe I can learn something from fixing this.
-Edit-

This is only a problem when running full-screen  application, everything in windowed mode I am able to flip seemly between

[ed boy]

When you say that the taskbar freezes, do you mean that the bar at the bottom with the list of programs becomes unresponsive?

[PsyberianHusky]

When you say that the taskbar freezes, do you mean that the bar at the bottom with the list of programs becomes unresponsive?

That is correct, and I am still able to alt tab while this is going on but the physical function of the bar is not working

[ed boy]

What OS are you using?
Does this always happen, or is it an intermittent problem?
Try changing the resolution and see if that also triggers the lockup.

[PsyberianHusky]

I am running vista 64, it is an intermidiate problem that happens after I alt tab from fullscreen to windows and no other time to my knowledge. gonna try the resolution thing in a second, I think I know where ya are going with this, if resolution it is vidya card problem?

[Falc]

If it also happens due to the resolution change, then yes it's graphics related but most likely your drivers and not the card itself.

Other question: do you have more than one hard drive in the PC? If yes, which one are your games installed on?

[Cassicotca]

It might be graphics related but it might also be that windows is unloading the game from RAM. When you click the bar it tries to make the desktop active (explorer.exe) but with no free RAM it would just freeze and crash. It usually only takes a couple seconds on normal systems to make the desktop active, how much ram do you have?

[Falc]

One further question: when you alt-tab out of the game, what do you see? Do you see a black screen or your game screen with the taskbar over it, or do you see your desktop/other windows and the taskbar?

[Akura]

Does it become unresponive like when a window becomes unresponsive? That happens to me sometimes, and I think it's just because the computer is too busy handling what it's already doing.

[PsyberianHusky]

Okay so I just did a resolution change and the task bar locked up for a couple seconds.
and I do keep all my games on one drive, and have 8GB of DDR2 ram?

should I attempt to update my drivers?

[Cassicotca]

A couple seconds lockup is normal and 8GB of RAM should be more then enough. Next thing to do would be updating the graphics driver and checking for viruses and see if it helps. I have games on a internal drive and a external USB drive and see no difference when tabbing.

[Astral]

If possible, try to set games to a non-"Exclusive mode," or a full screened, borderless window. This'll allow faster tabbing (without some issues associated with tabbing out of a full screen game).

I've been having occasional taskbar lockups on a Win7x64 during startup, but I traced the problem to my antivirus using the Event Logger.

[PsyberianHusky]

If possible, try to set games to a non-"Exclusive mode," or a full screened, borderless window. This'll allow faster tabbing (without some issues associated with tabbing out of a full screen game).

I've been having occasional taskbar lockups on a Win7x64 during startup, but I traced the problem to my antivirus using the Event Logger.

Thats a good idea,
Yea I know there are work arounds, and I kinda already have one myself, but part of the reason I try to fix things like this is cause I like to use them as a learning experience, I am probably going to try a safemode boot and see if I can find something out

[Virex]

I have games on a internal drive and a external USB drive and see no difference when tabbing.

You shouldn't see any difference anyway, since the game's written to the PC's page file, which resides somewhere on your hard disk. One thing that might help though is to make sure your disk has plenty of unfragmented space to write the game to. Also, paging is mostly a function of the speed of your hard disk, with the RAM generally being a lot faster and the processor being an order of magnitude faster still. So if your disk is heavily fragmented or just slow you're going to experience long paging times, even if the rest of your PC is pretty fast.
This is of course assuming that there is paging going on, which is doubtful if you've got plenty of RAM, because stuff only gets send off to the disk if it needs to make space for other programs.

[PsyberianHusky]

Is there a method to like reset my registry