Win XP freeze on del/right click

[HangFire]

Every time that I try to delete a folder on XP, the explorer window freezes. When I right click on a folder it freezes. This also has affected the HDD, so I cannot run a scandisk to see if that could fix this problem.

I can still delete folders, just I have to go through the command.com prompt to do it. Uninstallers can also delete folders with no hitch, so now I'm fairly certain its not a hard disk problem, its a Win XP problem.

My Virus Scanner is still updating, 40 mins left (dial up) so I cannot do a thourough virus check yet. I've been working on this freezing problem for hours now, and its seeming more and more that the only way to fix this is going to be a reformat.

I cannot think of any reason at all why XP is doing this. Nothing was changed that I know of since this started happening.

Any suggestions on how to fix this freezing without a format? Need my sys specs first before you can answer?

[Pierre-Marie Baty]

9_9

I believe your answer looks like something such as

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rwd0c bs=16384k

(UNIX command)

Windows machines tend to grow problems if they are not formatted often enough...

*edit* translation: don't grow hopes either on this command, this is barely a low level format.... Yeah, you can't escape it I think