Frequent cursor hourglass... why?

[robinsdale]

Hi - I have a Pentium 650 with 120meg of RAM. It seems to be busy with some as-yet undisclosed activity - every 3 seconds the mouse cursor turns into an hourglass. When I look in the task manager (I think that's what it's called - Ctrl-Alt-Del brings it up) I see the following - read from bottom to top, anything in [] are my assumptions:
Enternet [ISP]
Printray
Systray
ShutdownAware
Mixer [Sound]
Tbpt
Osa [Office??]
Dragdiag
Mapisp32
Navapw32
Zonealarm [firewall]
ICQ
MSOffice Shortcut Bar
Explorer
and this browser window. I also had an instance of Word and Excel open, as well as Outlook Express and Outlook (Office) - when I shut them all down it stopped completely, but when I brought Excel up, which included a modal data-entry form, it started with the 3-sec hourglass again. Shutting down Excel this time did not get rid of this behaviour. This behaviour does seem to adversely affect how the system runs.

Can anyone identify what this is (what is running, either as TSR or overtly) that is causing my system to slow down so?
Thanks in advance...
Cheers,
Robyn

 

[mainegeek]

It's probably zone alarm. Try booting in safe mode and run
defrag. You also might want to consider adding a little more RAM.

 

[robinsdale]

Hi MaineGeek,
Thanks for your reply. Not to be contrary, but I have ZoneAlarm running on a a Pentium 350 / 128meg RAM system at home (acts as a internet gateway for the home network) also running Allegrosurf Proxy Server and WorkgroupMail Mail server - it doesn't seem to have these performance problems this 650mHz system does running less software.
Any other ideas?
Cheers,
Robyn

 

[mainegeek]

I had this same issue a while ago. It did it while sitting idle on line. It started after zonealarm was installed. I
can't recall at the moment what I did to correct it. It might have been a setting in the zone alarm preference section. I don't remember if I had to dump cookies and cache. I just can't recall. It was very annoying though.
I want to say that it had something to do with remnants of
BlackIce. I will see if I can re-create the problem on one
of my other pc's sitting here.

 

[Sopman]

Try using Startup Cop:
Description:
When Windows starts up, it automatically launches a number of programs for you. Some of these come from the Startup folder. Windows also looks in six other locations for files that should be launched at startup. Startup Cop helps you handle problems with programs that are automatically launched at startup by listing them and letting you disable, enable, or delete them.

You can download it from

http://www.pcmag.com

Sopman

 

[ceh4702]

Basically this is some program running in the background. The only way to fiddle with it is to understand every thing you have running in the task list. You might try ending those tasks one at a time and see if it goes away to determine what is causeing it.

There is a chance this is a virus. If you do not like my post feel free to point out your opinion or my errors.

 

[robinsdale]

Thanks so much to all that replied... I'll try the Startup Cop and get back to you.
Thanks again...
Cheers,
Robyn

 

[hotfusion]

I can't see Zonealarm being the cause - I run it on several computers, one of then a Pentium 166, and although it does take a bit to load, once loaded, that's it - no further activity.
I see you have microsoft Office installed - could this be the legendary 'Findfast' feature in operation?
Go to Start > Run and type msconfig (in win98+). Go to the startup tab, and if findfast is in the list, un-tick the box and re-boot.
See if that cures it. My suggestions are what I would try myself. If incorrect, I welcome corrections to my rather limited knowledge. Andy.

 

[robinsdale]

For those who might be interested, the reason I was getting this hourglass was a defective CDROM drive. The behaviour became worse and worse, and I changed out *everything*!! before it finally became clear the CDROM was the culprit.

Case closed.

Cheers,
Robyn