Never Ending Spinning Circle At Random Times

mike888 · 28 Jan 2022

I hope this is the right forum to ask my question as the one for BSOD issues is more major than what I experience.

With Windows 10 I don't have any major issues but sometimes for no apparent reason I can get the spinning circle appear which temporarily disappears if I bring the mouse down to the taskbar but reappears as soon as I move it up to the Window.

Whilst this is happening I cannot do anything with the computer and have to wait a short time (30 seconds to a minute) and the screen goes black then white within about 3 seconds and returns me to the last used Window and the spinning circle disappears and I can continue to use the computer as normal.

In reliability history there was a red circle with a cross saying Windows explorer crashed and closed "app hang" and a report had been sent.

Unfortunately I cannot reproduce the report here as I immediately did a disk revert to before the incident took place. I then also installed the optional update preview for next month KB5009596 and have had no issues since.

I wondered if other people experience this strange behaviour. I have never had a BSOD on Windows 10 and don't visit any dodgy sites.

Compumind · 28 Jan 2022

Greetings!

First, clear all of your browser caches - one at at time, depending on the number of browsers that you use.

Then I would like you to run CCleaner Portable (free) from this site:

Builds

When started, select Registry and run with the defaults.
Do not backup the Registry when prompted (it's OK).
Make sure you run it until there are no entries to clean.

Then run it once again and select Custom Clean.
Just run it with the defaults until there are no entries to clean.

After that - reboot.

See if it happens again.

Post back.

Thanks,

mike888 · 29 Jan 2022

Although I got the error happen again today (spinning circle) with an event logged in reliability history I followed your advice word for word and the event has now disappeared from reliability history .
Lets hope everythings ok now, if it isn't I'll probably reinstal.

I do have other machines so it will be interesting to see if over time whether they have the same issue.

thomaseg1 · 30 Jan 2022

I sometimes get it when accessing an external drive .
mainly due to its waking up. other times it happens on a slow loading program.
defraging the disk helps. only effects Hard Drives (spinners) but not ssd's on my systems.

Paul Black · 07 Feb 2022

Hello @mike888,

Just as a tip which has worked for me in the past.

As you have probably come across in the past, defragmentation [ Internal or External ] can take a VERY long time. Therefore, it is advisable to turn Sleep OFF. Obviously you can turn Sleep back ON when completed. I am NOT saying that this will happen, but anything that you can do to STOP potential errors or system corruption has got to be a good thing, especially as diagnosing and resolving could take a LONG time and be very frustrating.

I hope this helps.