Member Avatar for slacke

Hello everybody,
I have some issue which I cannot even guess where to begin with solution. In one personal computer I have an application from which I don´t have the installation media. The previous owner lost it.
My motherboard (LGA775 sock) failed and I had to replace the motherboard and the CPU. I created an image of the original hard-drive and cloned it to a new drive (SATA to SATA). This is perfectly working now. I installed the new hardware drivers and the service packs (SP2 and SP3).
This was necessary because the new hardware components was not all recognized by the OS with SP1. (this was the original installation status)
Right now the application which I noted at the beginning is working too. It starts up and it also works.

The problem is that in some point the application hangs and cannot be killed even by task manager.
Thanks for all suggestions.

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Dani AI

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Good plan: isolate the problem in a safe, reproducible environment and capture the process state when the freeze happens. ’s VM suggestion is exactly the right first step; the SYSTEM-vs-admin behaviour that noted points to two common root causes — a hidden/modal UI on a different desktop or a kernel/driver block that normal user tools cannot clear — and the diagnostic steps below will quickly tell which one it is.

Convert the disk/image to a virtual disk and boot it under a hypervisor so you can snapshot and roll back while testing different service-pack/driver combinations. Use Disk2vhd to make a VHD and attach it to VirtualBox/VMware/Hyper-V (Disk2vhd). Take a snapshot, reproduce the hang, then revert and test with different SP levels or driver sets.

Collect runtime evidence when the app hangs. Use Process Explorer to see the process owner, open handles and thread stacks — double‑click the process, go to Threads and inspect each thread’s Stack to see whether it is blocked in user code or in a kernel driver (Process Explorer). Capture a user‑mode dump for offline analysis with ProcDump (ProcDump). If you need to act as SYSTEM for killing or inspection, run an interactive SYSTEM shell with PsExec, but use caution:

psexec -i -s cmd.exe
tasklist | findstr YourAppName
taskkill /F /PID 1234

If thread stacks point into kernel modules (ntoskrnl.sys or vendor .sys), treat it as a driver issue — update/revert the driver or keep the app inside a VM. If stacks are in userland but you find a modal dialog on another desktop, use Process Explorer or a window-inspection tool to locate and bring that dialog to the foreground. Also check Event Viewer, look for DRM/licensing drivers or legacy services, and try Compatibility Mode (Windows 2000) or a clean boot. Collecting a dump and the thread stacks is the single most useful artifact for definitive diagnosis.

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Member Avatar for JorgeM

I would test this images in a Virtual Guest without applying the service packs and see what happends. Then if it works OK, apply SP3 and test again. By the way, for OS service packs, you do not have to apply them in order. You can go from SP1 to SP3. In MS Office, you do apply them in order.

Member Avatar for slacke

Thank you for your answer. I will give it a try.
Actual status is - it looks like there are some permission problems. For example when I run the application in my user (admin) I cannot stop the application. It freezes in this point.
But when I use the SYSTEM user it is able to successfully close the application. Actually the application is trying to pop-up a message for me (Do you whant to quit) but in standard user I never get the popup window?
I forgot to mention the OS - Windows Xp Home.

Member Avatar for JorgeM

It could be service pack related.

Member Avatar for slacke

I think that this will be the case since the application looks like was designed fro windows 2000. I think that WinXp SP1 is closer to windows 2000 then SP3. Do anybody have an overwiev of those XP service packs?
How much those SPs modify the OS structure? I am going to try it with SP1.

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