Windows 7 issues - taskhost.exe freezing....

I have a couple of issues with Windows 7.

My biggest issue seems to affect Steam games. The only one I have not seen it cause a problem with is Left 4 Dead, although it very well may be an issue with L4D or any other game or large application as well, I have loaded a lot of Steam games since installing Windows 7 a few days ago, so that may be why I have only seen this problem with Steam games.

What happens, is if I open a steam game, it randomly takes forever to load, finally does, plays the intro movie and then hangs a while and loads the game. When the game loads, it works fine until I exit. Now when I exit the game, let's say I do anything with the start menu or desktop, it takes forever. If I right click a desktop icon, and goto properties, I have to wait quite a while for the window to open. I can eventually tell the task manager to open by hitting Ctrl+alt+delete or right clicking the taskbar, the icon immediately appears in the system tray, and after a 5+ minute wait, the task manager opens, and most of the time it's completely frozen no matter how long I wait, forcing me to Ctrl+alt+delete and restart.

In the rare event, I can get to the processes tab on the task manager and end the taskhost.exe process, which is a Microsoft process, so all that tells me is I can rule out drivers.

Has anyone else experienced this? Is there a fix out there? Can I disable taskhost.exe? What is taskhost.exe? All I know about it, is from googling it that it used to crash a lot(not freeze) in earlier beta versions...

Another issue I am having....

I run the 32bit OS and 2gb of RAM, which seems to be more than enough in Windows 7 just as it is in XP, which is a very, very good thing!

Call of Duty 5: World At War runs at a great framerate (a solid 91+ most of the time, never dropping below 80) but still manages to run very choppy at times. In Vista, due to memory leaks I would run out of memory (yes even when I ran 8gb and x64) and anything would be unplayable despite the system posting decent framerates. Now, the memory management in Windows 7 is much, much better than it is in Vista and it uses much less and they fixed the memory leaks, but I'm having a similar issue. It seems to last a little while, and go away -- seems like it's paging after the fact. Is there anything I can do to tweak this? All I have found is run HDI memtest to take up all the available RAM causing the OS to free up the 1550mb RAM and then CoD5 will have the 850mb or so it wants free. This seems to work, but is there any way I can tweak this?

Also, if anyone finds a Classic start menu, hook me up. I really do not like the new start menu that Microsoft is trying to forcefeed us - not friendly at all to keyboard users.

One other problem, I sort of left out.

My first couple days, everything went smoothly minus the taskhost.exe but with Steam games I mentioned earlier.

Now, after a couple days, explorer hangs up somewhat frequently. This seems to be a carryover issue from Vista, as the longer I had the OS installed, the more often explorer freezes up. It usually only happens when I load to the desktop.

And while I am at it, if I really want to nitpick -- because I can totally live with this one if it never gets fixed -- I decided to play with icon spacing on my desktop icons, and if I change the spacing and hit apply, it takes maybe a minute to re-render the desktop with the new spacing, which is annoying. However if I hit OK, it's instant.

Welcome to the site Dean I play L4D all the time on my machine and it works great now - I did have some issues with it not connecting to servers initially, but that's all fixed now.

Have you installed any chipset drivers for your motherboard? It's a shot in the dark, but lots of those problems seem to be because your system is waiting for drive access. A couple of others here had similar problems and installing the latest chipset drivers did the trick (they weren't as specific to pinpoint the hanging process, so this could be something different altogether).

This is the RC build I guess?

This is the RC build from microsoft, 7100.

I do not see Windows 7 versions of chipset drivers. Do the Vista drivers typically work here? I've been wary installing chipset drivers because I'm not sure if it'll totally mess things up or not. I run an Asus Rampage Extreme - X48 chipset.

L4D was the only Steam game that doesn't seem to be giving me an issue, but it might be random, I really haven't had enough time to pinpoint it exactly. TF2 was the most problematic, but like I said I think a good amount of it has to do with me loading a lot of Steam games, and also probably the times I load them too.

As it's an X48 chipset Windows 7 should probably work fine with it out of the box. Perhaps try installing the latest Matrix Storage beta driver (8.9.0.1014) and see if that does the trick, the latest ones are Windows 7 compatible:

Download here : http://station-drivers.com/page/intel%20raid.htm
Release Notes, inc W7 info : http://station-drivers.com/telecharg...8.9.0.1014.htm

As it's an X48 chipset Windows 7 should probably work fine with it out of the box. Perhaps try installing the latest Matrix Storage beta driver (8.9.0.1014) and see if that does the trick, the latest ones are Windows 7 compatible:

Download here : http://station-drivers.com/page/intel%20raid.htm
Release Notes, inc W7 info : http://station-drivers.com/telecharg...8.9.0.1014.htm

Well first off, thanks for the help here.

I installed the drivers, and managed to reboot (twice actually) and haven't crashed or bombed my install or anything from what I can tell, so this is a good thing...

Need to give it time to see if it fixes that locking up problem now...

Fingers crossed

Well explorer has only crashed once -- after I changed video drivers and the uninstall blue screened, and when I logged in the error popped up and the desktop didn't load.....

The stuttering in CoD5 seems improved, although it's still there to a lesser extent.

And Taskhost still freezes up...

Well a little update. I read that the Steam freezing issue is somehow related to ATIs Vista drivers from 9.2 and on and 9.5 still did not fix it, so I think it's safe to assume what people were talking about was the same issue I am experiencing -- although no one gave a very good description so it may not be.

The XP drivers literally have 0 issues (at least the proper versions, 9.3 and 8.12 are both perfect in XP). And I hardly ever used Vista since I got ATI cards so I really wouldn't know...