This problem came on suddenly last week and I can’t figure out why. I haven’t changed any settings or done anything out of the ordinary that I can think of. One day, when I tried to put my Dell Inspiron 6000 laptop (with Windows XP SP3) into “standby mode”, it froze while on the “Preparing to standby” screen. At first I thought the problem was a mechanical one, as I usually put my laptop in standby by closing the cover. But even when manually selecting standby from the shutdown menu there is still the hangup at the “preparing” screen.
I’ve run Malwarebytes and the other anti-spyware and rootkit programs suggested in the sticky to no avail. Searching for the problem on Google returns some results, but nothing I’ve not been able to rule out by checking my power settings (and again, I haven’t changed any settings at all, at least not knowingly).
Assuming by “froze” you mean that the computer itself became non-responsive, and your only resource was to cut power, I’ve only had that happen when I had installed a new program. I had to uninstall it and roll back to a time before it was installed using System Restore.
It’s also possible that files are corrupted. sfc may be able to help, although it can run into problems on SP3. Here’s the best guide I’ve seen. The problem you may run into is if you don’t actually have an XP SP3 CD (which most people don’t.) If you do, that guide should help. Just remember that the appropriate files are in WINDOWS\ServicePackFiles\i386
Well, I just tried the scannow thing and Windows threw a major error. I got a blue screen indicating that Windows had shut down to avoid a major problem. When I restarted Windows, the automatic error reporting program started. I looked to see what the report contained and it listed the following files: