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Tim_80525

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2754

March 21st, 2006 03:00

XP's "workstation" service causing trouble

Strange. I began having serious problems a day or two ago. System performance became extremely bad on certain tasks, like:
  • Logins can take 5 to 8 minutes from password to desktop.
  • Many file operations, like delete or preview, hang the "explorer" process. I have to kill it with Task Manager, and wait for Windows to restart it to proceed.
  • Internet Explorer is vitually useless; it seems to hang as soon as it sees something complex like an embedded Flash object. Another browser works (Avant) works fine. I think Firefox worked, too, but I removed it as part of my early troubleshooting (for I had just updated to Firefox 1.5 when the problems began).
  • Various minor instabilities appeared. For instance, as I was trying to switch users once, I began getting the "Did you forget your password?" error with every keystroke in the password field. After a reboot, that went away.
  • I am unable to connect to the other computer on my home network.
I used the Dell troubleshooting tool, and it helped me isolate the problem. I found that if I use the msconfig tool to disable the " Workstation" service, the first four items above return to normal (I still can't talk to the other computer on my home network).
 
As soon as I enable the Workstation service, however, all the problems reappear. 
 
So I'm convinced that's the culprit. The problem is, I have no idea what's caused it to begin misbehaving this way, nor what I can do to "reset" it to a default behavior. The " workstation" service is described as follows:
Creates and maintains client network connections to remote servers. If this service is stopped, these connections will be unavailable. If this service is disabled, any services that explicitly depend on it will fail to start.
So I'm not surprised that I'm cut off from my home network, but then it seems odd that I can use the Internet at all. Obviously, I'm missing something here.
 
I searched the Microsoft Knowledge Base, with little luck. I did try to download a patch for this service (MS03-049, http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=828749, part of SP2), but it detected a newer version of the file and would not install.
 
Any ideas out there? Thanks
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