To find out what was up Gary turned to , a freeware stay-on-top system monitor. Glint showed disk reads were the problem, but what process was responsible? For that he turned to Microsoft's freeware : that "showed unbelievable open, query, close cycles on WCESCOMM.LOG."

Not knowing what this file was, Gary searched and found it belongs to Microsoft's . "Ah ha!," he says. "I had installed [ActiveSync] to sync my phone remotely a long time ago, but it doesn't work when Outlook is hooked up over a VPN."

So Gary used the freeware to remove ActiveSync and voilà! His PC immediately started to behave itself.

Now Glint "showed very little activity, whereas it had been lit up like a Christmas tree previously," Gary says. "Filemon also showed very little activity, where before it had been overwhelmed with open, query, close cycles. These symptoms sounded similar to what you described for deferred procedure calls."

Gary noted that "the freeze ALWAYS occurred the first time a file was deleted. If you kept deleting files -- no freeze ups. But if you went on to other activities, then returned to Explorer to delete a file -- freeze! Likewise, the first e-mail opened in Outlook would cause a similar freeze. But subsequent opens breezed through. But if you switched windows and returned to Outlook, the first e-mail opened would cause a freeze. In all cases, the disk light was on solid and it would be 30+ seconds before you got the PC back. There's a clear pattern here. And it was repetitive -- not random. I could make the PC freeze at will."