Strange pauses while accessing video properties

[Unfocused]

Whenever I want to bring up the video properties window it takes about 20 seconds for it to show up, during which I'm getting strange pauses in the functioning of the system - about every 5 seconds, the whole system comes to a halt for about 2 seconds. Everything stops including audio. This happens a few times, then the video properties window finally pops up. If I close it and want to open it again, the whole process repeats.

Same thing happens when I log into Battlefield 2 but it takes more system halts before everything starts functioning properly.

What the hell?

 

[Barney Fife]

There are lots of reasons for system to pause when playing games or listening to music. The usual suspects are lack of system resource, spyware/virus and or, overdue system maintenance.
The Video property you speak of; is it the Nvidia Control Panel?

Also whats your system spec?

 

[Asus]

You're not just trying to access properties from video on a CD are ya? hehe

 

[Unfocused]

There are lots of reasons for system to pause when playing games or listening to music. The usual suspects are lack of system resource, spyware/virus and or, overdue system maintenance.
The Video property you speak of; is it the Nvidia Control Panel?

Also whats your system spec?

PIV 2,8Ghz
1,5GB RAM
6800GS
Intel D845PESV mobo

Never had the problem with this setup until recently.

My system pauses like that only when accessing video properties (right-click on the desktop->properties; not even going to the nvidia CP tab) and while starting up BF2 from what I experienced.

You're not just trying to access properties from video on a CD are ya? hehe

Nah.


EDIT: Tried reinstalling the drivers - didn't help. Same pauses in safe-mode. Can this problem be hardware related ie. some part of the GPU started malfunctioning and has problems sending certain requested data?

 

[Unfocused]

Looks like it's a HDD problem after all. I noticed I'm getting a "Error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk0\D during a paging operation" in the Event View in the Control Panel, whenever these freezes happen. Now if I could only get my floppy drive to read diskettes, so I could run SeaTools for DOS ><

EDIT: I'll use HDD Regenerator instead, it can create a bootable CD. BTW, how reliable is chkdsk, reporting 0 bad sectors after a 30 second scan? Surely it can't check all sectors in this amount of time? And it's not like certain data on my disk can't be accessed - it can but it takes much much longer than usual. So maybe I'm looking the wrong way? Suggestions please.