Three questions:
1. What's running on startup?
2. What's running in the background after startup?
3. What icons do you see in the system tray?

Usually, dealing with these issues will solve most lockups.

Srartup --Messenger, McAfee, LoadQm, Sys tray, Load power profile, Task Monitor,Scan reg,PCHealth,ZoneAlarm

I monitor the start-up regularily and even though I uncheck items for startup they reappear after awhile. Why?

System Tray-- McAfee,Messenger,ZoneAlarm,Win Updates

Backgnd-- Normally has Exp,ZoneAlarm,Messenger,Mcagent,Vsmon(ZoneAlarm),Osa(Office),Loadqm,Systray

I have not noticed anything strange in the backgnd when it locks-up but I will now be more observant.

Lockup occurs most frequently during printing and while using Word and OE.

Thanks for your help much appreciated.

 

First, your startup and background programs are slimmed down nicely. However, I suggest you delete Office Startup from your Startup group. Office is normally a resource hog, and OSA only makes things worse. I'd be surprised if you'll notice the difference.

The other program to disable is LoadQM. The AnswersThatWork list will tell you how:

http://www.answersthatwork.com/Tasklist_pages/tasklist.htm

That may not totally solve things. Please post back if you can provide any more clues.

On the latest hangup I found Hpzstatz (also Hpzeng02 & Hpzstc02 these may be not be latest drivers) running in backgd. I deleted Hpzstatz. Also as per instruction I beleive I have disabled LoadQM. I have not been sussessful in keeping Office off the Startup list --it just keeps coming back. Since many of the hangups were printer related-- and after reading Hpzstatz's bad press I feel hopefull that a major problem cause might be cured. I will keep posting back to this thread to report success/failure.

Thanks again,

With MS Office, you may need to delete the MS Office Startup from the Program Startup folder. I don't know of any setting in Office for this.

Hope things improve.

My computer works 100% better haven't had a lock-up in two days. A bonus is that it appears to run much faster. I was under the (false) impression that when I unchecked a program in the start-up menu of msconfig that it should would not run in the background, but this is only until you restart and then the ^&* reappears. Do I have to delete (in the Windows start-up file) any programs  that I don't want running in the background . Is there a danger in doing this?

Thanks again for great help!

Yes, some things must be deleted from the Startup folder. A few things you might have that are not needed are:

• AOL or RealPlayer tray icon
• MS Office Startup
• MS Works Calendar Reminder
• Printer startup programs, almost never needed

Things you need:

• Scanner software
• Firewall/antivirus programs

Optional things would be screensavers, IM programs, etc.