Weird Vista Error

[Bogdan]

I recently got an HP 8710w Workstation for a great price. I'm really loving the computer, but every once in a while, I get a ridiculous error. I leave my machine on more many hours at a time, and sometimes when I get back to the screen, I see a pop-up that says "psd runtime application has stopped working." I click OK and from then on, Vista sorta dies.

- I can't open any new programs
- All the recent files disappear from Recent Items on the Start menu
- None of the Start buttons are clickable
- Firefox loses all its program associations (ie. I can't download and open a Word Document)
- I can't save my work

I solve this problem by doing a hard reboot... This doesn't happen too often, so I'll probably keep the machine, but I would like to find out what the cause is. Anyone hear of anything like this happening before? Is this something HP Support could fix (I have a 3 year warranty)?

Any and all comments will be appreciated!

 

[fitz]

not sure how much help HP support would be - couldn't hurt to ask.

I'd probably start by suspecting the Trusted Platform software/drivers that was probably loaded by default - as I'm assuming you haven't done a clean install yourself. In particular, I'd start with the Personal Secure Drive Service..

What version of Vista are you running? And do you have any of the encryption turned on?