Today we look at an issue I had this past weekend. I fired up UT3 as I’ve done for a week on the dual 3870′s and after a bit of playing the game locked. I was able to ctrl-alt-del out of UT and end it. I fired it up again and total hell began. I locked up after a bit in an online game and this time it was a hard lock, no ctrl-alt-del would save it. I rebooted wondering WTF happened since the system has played flawlessly. Again, hard lock up and again on several occasions. I decided to fire up BF2142 thinking just maybe it was the browser or communications with the master server for UT3 and again lock up. I got pissed, it was late and I crashed.

Today with less brew, I thought to look at the log… The only thing I saw was a message about update.exe not responding in the system log file on several occasions. I did notice before kicking off any games that wuauclt.exe was taking up a rather large amount of RAM (around 50,000 K) but attributed it to the reboot and Windows update always kicking off the task on a reboot. What I think I found is an issue that it was attempting to check for updates and couldn’t communicate with Microsoft Update and locked the system while I was gaming. I’ve ran UT3 multiple times tonight with no issues and this is the only thing I can attribute it to. I found a few messages around the internet regarding update.exe and losing virtual memory and crashes.

This is the first time I’ve seen something like this in a long time in terms of issues with XP. I thought maybe it was system temperatures since I’ve had the house a bit warmer with the 5 degree temps but system temps were well within reason. I can only attribute it to Murphy’s Law and my adamant defense of XP’s stability recently on Digg.