I am having fairly regular crashes on my machine. I have a decent amount of RAM (2Gb) but I also have a lot of applications open. The crash is usually caused by either firefox.exe wlmail.exe paintdotnet.exe I cannot be sure it's those applications directly, it might be a by product of other applications running at the same time but it is always one of these that runs the CPU up to 100%. Now, when I go to the task manager and the program, everything is okay for about 10 seconds until I click on something else on the desktop or window. Suddenly explorer or crashdump.exe comes to the top of the list hogging 100% Any ideas on how to debug this? I don't think it's a memory issue and I have run a few memtest passes with no errors. What I can say is that the crashing application is ALWAYS an internet connected application. Of the applications that crash it's always when I'm either saving a file to an FTP folder, accessing data, just opened a new tab in FF, or maybe mail being checked periodically. The application that always runs the CPU up to 99% first is wlmail.exe dealbook.exe firefox.exe When these are killed using task manager, explorer.exe then runs it up to 99% and I have to power off. This makes me think it's something like svchost or something else handling incoming data but I'm not sure how I could track this as the windows utilities or bug reports probably wouldn't have logged any information about the crash because the CPU runs so high that the system becomes sluggish and I have to power off to restart. Any ideas on some utilities to use?

"I have run a few memtest passes with no errors." Run memtest overnight. Any failures are unacceptable.

Ok, I will but I don't think it's a memory problem. Are there any applications I can use to catch the problem? I suspect because no actual crash happens but CPU just runs up, that a memory dump is not created.

See MS site on how to read and interpret dump files. Might be that event log had time to report also. Start there actually. Playing to the angels Les Paul (1915-2009)

There's no dumpfile because there's no BSOD, the system doesn't actually crash, it just runs the CPU up to 99%, which is as good as a crash but actually everything just runs very very slowly. At about the time of the last crash, I can find these errors in the event viewer but not sure if they're related. Event Viewer: Application: Event Type: Error Event Source: nview_info Event Category: None Event ID: 1 Date: 23/09/2009 Time: 22:46:17 User: N/A Computer: GONZO Description: The description for Event ID ( 1 ) in Source ( nview_info ) cannot be found. The local computer may not have the necessary registry information or message DLL files to display messages from a remote computer. You may be able to use the /AUXSOURCE= flag to retrieve this description; see Help and Support for details. The following information is part of the event: NVIEW : Explorer: Entered Mutex Recovery Code. NView (and Mutexes) are not enabled. . System: Event Type: Error Event Source: Service Control Manager Event Category: None Event ID: 7023 Date: 23/09/2009 Time: 22:48:52 User: N/A Computer: GONZO Description: The IPSEC Services service terminated with the following error: An invalid argument was supplied. For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/even...

7 passes on memtest, no errors at all.