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I've been having a weird issue with Windows 10 ever since I installed it early this year.

My issue is that my system "pseudofreezes". It's not really frozen: I can move the mouse, hover on things and have tool tips displayed; apps that are already open are responsive, but I can't open any other apps. Rebooting doesn't work, and I normally wind up hard resetting, though sometimes the problem resolves itself and everything goes back to normal.

Pseudofreeze seems to happen shortly after booting, though not during it. Everything that's supposed to load on boot does so with no problems. I don't think I've ever seen a pseudofreeze happen much later after booting. Typically, I notice my system is pseudofrozen while I'm using Chrome.

The most common way I notice pseudofreeze is happening is that I open a new Chrome tab and it's completely blank. Existing tabs look fine and can be scrolled normally, except if they need to load stuff often (e.g. twitter feed), in which case the content never loads and the wheel spins forever. Also, clicking links will lead nowhere. Generally, accessing the task manager during a pseudofreeze is impossible, but in those rare cases when it did open, I could see that system interrupts where using 100% of the processor.

I did some research on the Internet and found out that I'm not the only one with this issue. I can't find the post right now, but there was a guy with the exact same issue who claimed he talked to a Microsoft support person who said it was a user account problem and recommended to create a new one. The guy did so and allegedly solved his problem. I did it too, about a week ago, and I got a pseudofreeze both yesterday and today. It may be an odd coincidence, but I think it happens most frequently, if not only, on weekends.

I'm pretty sure I've had pseudofreezes happen before launching Chrome (eg I was unable to launch other apps before I tried to launch Chrome), so I'd tend to think it's not Chrome's fault. Besides, I launch Chrome pretty soon after boot, so it might simply be that Chrome is affected by the pseudofreeze because as said it only happens after booting and never again during the entire day.

Other things I tried:

  • sfc /scannow: I do that regularly. I've had the pseudofreezes whether or not sfc found issues, and they were always resolved anyway.
  • DISM: ditto.
  • Updating graphics card drivers: no use.
  • Scan disk: no errors.
  • Checking Windows logs: the only odd thing I can see is an audit failure that happens often, even well past the pseudofreeze. The log says:

Code integrity determined that the image hash of a file is not valid. The file could be corrupt due to unauthorized modification or the invalid hash could indicate a potential disk device error.

File Name: \Device\HarddiskVolume1\Windows\System32\guard64.dll

That's the message in the overwhelming majority of the cases. In one instance the file name was different.

  • AV and malware scan: I do that regularly. Nothing there.

My installation of Windows 10 is a fresh one, ie it's not installed on top of previous OSs. (I had upgraded Windows 7 to Windows 10 at a point and it was godawful. Wound up wiping my hard drive and reinstall afresh. As a side note, nothing like this ever happened on Windows 7.)

I update Windows regularly, whenever I am asked to.

When pseudofreeze happens, there doesn't seem to be any special disk activity. The disk LED is normally off. Also, CPU temperature is normal.

I'm well above the minimum specs for Windows 10: AMD FX-8350 4.0GHz, 8 cores; MSI GeForce 1050 Ti 4GB; 16GB RAM; SSD 120GB.

I am not having any other issues except pseudofreeze. No system crashes, no normal freezes, no BSODs, nothing.

Any idea what this might be about?

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  • Hi, follow the steps from my comment here. After you got the freeze and 100% interrupts, go back to cmd and stop logging. With this file I can see what is wrong
    – magicandre1981
    Commented May 30, 2020 at 7:46
  • High interrupts usually denote a hardware issue, whatever that is. In your case, I'd go for defective RAM and/or VRAM, a bad graphics driver, maybe. Have you considered disabling pagefile entirely, just to eliminate the possibility of disk write issues?
    – user1019780
    Commented May 30, 2020 at 7:58
  • @magicandre1981 I can try, though I don't know when I'll get the file, since the pseudofreeze happens after boot about once a week. I can't trigger it, so I will essentially have to try this every day until it happens.
    – Nicola
    Commented May 30, 2020 at 8:22
  • ok, replace the 60 with -1 in the command to let it run for hours, it will internally override old unimportant data
    – magicandre1981
    Commented May 30, 2020 at 8:24
  • @magicandre1981 This morning I ran the command right after boot and let it go. Few minutes later I got a pseudofreeze so bad that the entire screen went blank and had to hard reset. After my PC booted up again, the command had created no file. I don't know why. Other times I tried the command when there was no pseudofreeze, the command had created a file and a folder even before I stopped it.
    – Nicola
    Commented Jun 2, 2020 at 5:37

1 Answer 1

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I think magicandre1981 was correct. After updating the NIC driver, I haven't had a pseudofreeze in over two weeks and I doubt I'll have one again. Thanks to magicandre1981 for solving this!

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