Applications Hang

Hi All,

I have a client that has a Windows 11 Home machine. She uses Adobe Acrobat and Google Drive for desktop for most of her work. Lately what she has been experiencing most often is that if she tries to move a file from one folder in Google Drive to another, the process will pause for a while and then go through. Sometimes she will just rename a file and it says she doesn't have the permissions to do so. We even noticed a popup that said there wasn't enough memory to complete the operation.
I ran a full system diagnostics using Dell support assist as well as ran system diagnostics in system recovery environment. I also checked the hardware and everything checked out fine.
I checked event logs and I do see an event for VSS and then explorer.exe that follow each other. The error in the logs says explorer stops talking to Windows. Though they don't happen all the time. I'm at a loss on this one as after checking all the hardware, everything checks out fine. The hard drive is not full and I don't see any errors anywhere. Sorry if this is a lot. Anyone got any additional thoughts on what would case what appears to be some kind of process hang?

Thanks,

Does it happen in clean boot?

Yeah, the machine boots normal every time and I don't see any critical errors on the system.

Does Reliability History have any entries ?

jctech2025 said:

yeah, the machine boots normal every time and I don't see any critical errors on the system.

Click to expand...

No, I mean have you troubleshooted Google Drive file issues while in a clean boot state.
Here's how I would troubleshoot the issue. It's a matter of using proess of elimination to find out what is NOT causing the issue.

EDITED TO ADD: Uninstall the offending app using Revo Uninstaller Free. After Revo completes use its SCAN feature, making sure to remove all leftover files and registry entries. Restart and Re-install the offending app.

CLEAN BOOT
Perform a clean boot to eliminate software conflict causing the issue. If it doesn't happen in a clean boot, you have some software conflicting with Windows. Brink's procedure will help you weed out which one. Perform a Clean Boot in Windows 11 to Troubleshoot Software Conflicts

DISM/SFC
Make sure you have no corrupt system files that is causing this problem. Open a command prompt as administrator and type dism /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth
When complete restart. Then open command prompt as admin again and run sfc /scannow
Pay attention to the scan results to see if SFC found anything it could not repair

SAFE BOOT
See if issue happens in safe boot https://www.elevenforum.com/t/boot-to-safe-mode-in-windows-11.538/

Run disk cleanup. In search box search for "disk", In search results RIGHT click on Disk Cleanup & select 'run as administrator'
Along with what will already be checked, also put a check by Previous Windows Installations and Temporary Files
If using HDDS, Defrag them. search 'defrag'. In search results select "Defragment and Optimize" drives. The app will tell you which drives are fragmented and need to be optimized

Your can prove the issue is not specific to the current user account by creating another account to test with. Make it an administrator. If it doesn't happen using another account, it points to corruption of some sort in the current account.

Do a repair install with an in place upgrade, If it is a Windows problem, this usually fixes it if all else has failed to.

Note the above post has been edited to add another step.