system freeze as Youtube web page loads

April 28, 2008

Over the last three days, I've tried to access two separate youtube

links on two separate occasions to find the W98 system freezes as the

page is initially displayed. No keybd/mouse response. Required a

hardware reboot to recover. I don't normally access youtube, but had

done so in the previous week without problems.

First link was:

The first time the problem occurred, I did a quick disk check - lost

clusters found (and repaired).

I retried the same link with number crunching background activity

disabled - with the same result. Repeated disk check and then

attempted to run defrag - incomplete after hitting a bad sector. This

was repaired by running a complete disk check, including the surface

test, after which the defrag would complete.

Retried the link a third time with number crunching disabled - with

the same result. Disk checked again without errors.

The failed attempt to reach a differing Youtube link today (same

system freeze), suggests that the problem wasn't going away by itself.

The browser used is still the older Mozilla 1.7.11 - no changes here

in over a year, and none expected in the future (without migrating to

firefox or seamonkey).

Trying for the same link using IE6 (rarely used but as up to date as

MS permits) I got a blue screen that would not recover but that

allowed a keybd ctrl/alt/del to reboot.

Repeating this (if only to note down the OE exception number) produced

normal performance.....?

Repeating the attempt using default Mozilla then also produced normal

performance.

What could be responsible for this strange behavior in this W98 2ed OS

(-8th year without reinstall)?

Of course the youtube link was a waste of time, as usual.

RL

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