Windows 7 Ultimate Freezes During Right-Click Action, Devices and Printers won't load

[dragondame]

I have been racking my brain on this one for a few weeks now.

I help my husband run a local onsite IT support business, and we build photo editing machines for a photography studio. One of them is using a Crosshair V Formula board, running Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit.

About two months ago, the computer kept freezing whenever you would right click on a file or folder on the desktop and could not print. Whenever you would open Devices and Printers, the green status bar at the top of the windows would just keep going and going and no printers would show up what so ever. It eventually got so bad, the computer was not usable, so we simply performed a clean Windows install.

That seemed to fix the problem...for a while. Now about two weeks ago, we hear the same problems are going on, except it is intermittent. The person who uses the computer daily says she has to reboot the computer a few times every morning before she can use it. Then it works fine for the rest of the day, until she comes in the next morning and has to reboot again.

I've been having a hard time troubleshooting the issue because it's so intermittent, and a lot of the time, everything works fine. We did a manual reset of the BIOs, turned on Bluetooth Services (the computer does not use any bluetooth devices, but it was a popular fix for the Devices and Printers issue), turned off Windows Firewall and messed a little with the Windows registries (very little, because I am generally worried with messing something up). Trial and error solutions are not really an option since the problem is not always there.

I plan to post my question on a Windows 7 forum as well, but thought someone here might be able to offer some assistance. Does this sound like a hardware problem or a Windows 7 problem? RMAing the board is not an option, at the moment, because of how busy the photography studio is right now, and the computer is still mostly functional.

Thanks in advance!

[Chino]

Can you list the specifications of this system for me please? Try to make it as detailed as possible.

[dragondame]

Sorry it took so long to respond. I thought I finally had the problem fix by uninstalling the anti-virus software, but the problem came back after a week.

Here are the details on the machine:

Motherboard: Crosshair V Formula
Processor: AMD FX-8150 4.2 Ghz 8 core
SSD: PCi Express OCZ RevoDrive3 X2
RAM: Corsair 32GBs of 1600 MHz (part no CMZ32GX3M4A1600C9)
Graphics: Nvidia GeForce GTX 260
Power Supply: Corsair HX650

[totalrognoob]

Stupid question, I had something kind of like it when I had a dead mouse(I think it was shorting and tripping something), have you tried replacing that with a known good one?

[toronto699]

is the printer supported by the OS ? go to the printer product page see if the drivers are W7 compatible

[dragondame]

I haven't tried replacing the mouse, but it is relatively new. The right-click issue the computer is having seems to be Windows Explorer crashing.

All the printers have Windows 7 drivers, but this particular computer is the only computer in the whole studio that uses a specific type of printer the others don't.

However, the computer is suddenly working fine again, with no issues for a week and a half. I'm utterly baffled. Shortly after posting my last comment, I tried installing the anti-virus software again and running a virus scan, but it stopped halfway through. The scan was still counting, but the rest of the computer was unresponsive. I'm beginning to think there may be some infection, but I have not had the opportunity to return there after hours in the past week to look into it further.