Every computer user has asked themselves the following questions:

• Why is my program not responding?
• What is taking so long…why is it running so slow?

Most of the time we think the program is actually doing something until we get frustrated enough to start clicking in the window and we get the Programming not Responding Error.

There are several possible causes for this happening such as:

• Resources conflicts
• Programming Errors
• No resources available
• Hardware Errors
• Viruses and Spyware

Symptoms

Windows expects applications to interact with it so when you type something or click on the application window, Windows expects the application to respond to the request. When it doesn’t, Program not Responding will appear in the window title bar. It may not be responding because it is doing something else at the moment or it may be hung and need closing. The application may eventually come out of the hung state and start responding again. Let’s look at the cause and a couple of examples.

Resource Conflicts

Sometimes there is nothing wrong. The application may just be doing something that is taking a lot of time because it is CPU intensive and you have several applications open and it has to wait its turn and share the CPU with other applications. A module on the computer schedules the amount of time each application is allowed to use the CPU before it has to stop and wait for its next turn. For example, let’s say you have Photoshop and Outlook both open. You are saving a file with multiple layers and special effects in Photoshop. That usually takes a little bit of time.

Now let’s suppose you have your email client configured to check for new mail every 5 minutes. If your email client is ready to check for new email while Photoshop is saving the file, the CPU scheduler may make Photoshop stop and let Outlook have a turn using the CPU. They will have to take turns until one of them is finished using the CPU.

In this case you have two options. Open the task manager and terminate the program that is not responding. Or you can go do something else for a while. In my case since I was saving a file that had taken hours to create, so I decided to have dinner. When I was finished and came back, everything was responding again and my file was saved.

Programming Error

Sometimes it is possible to cause an application to go into an infinite loop. When that happens, it cannot respond to windows and is definitely hung. All a user can do is use task manager to terminate the application. If it continues to happen, you can either reinstall the application or try to figure out what action you are taking that causes the problem.

For example, I use outlook as my email client at home. I have several email accounts being pulled into outlook from my ISP, yahoo and hotmail. In almost all cases, the To: field just has my name in it. Every time I would right click on my name to see what account the email was sent to, outlook would hang. I reinstalled it and it still did it. I reported it to Microsoft…tried one of their fixes…no success. My solution…I no longer right click on my name. I haven’t had the problem since.

No Resources Available

Since I do some very heavy duty graphics work, I frequently have Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, multiple instances of Firefox and Outlook open at the same time. All of those applications are greedy pigs when it comes to memory. Sometimes I just run out of memory and most if not all of the applications hang. By that I mean that I have run out of RAM and there is no more room in my swap file for the operating system to store the data being used by all of the open applications. I have had to increase my virtual memory (swap file size) several times during the past few months. I could also close some of the open files but I actually do need them all open to work efficiently.

Hardware Errors

If a hardware device fails for some reason, an application that tries to access the hardware device will most probably hang and stop responding. The same thing can happen if the hardware is busy and unable to respond or a driver gets corrupted. Always install the latest hardware drivers on your computer and if you suspect a problem, run the hardware diagnostics to see if they detect a problem.

Viruses and Spyware

Many viruses and malware programs can cause other applications to hang. Viruses hang application because they damage files or write malformed code to the registry. Malware hangs applications because they frequently are sending information to a database somewhere out on the internet and are gobbling up all of your computer’s resources. But since you are not aware that they are running, you probably won’t suspect that is what is causing the problem.

Summary

If you encounter a Program not Responding error, run you anti virus program, you anti spyware program and a good registry cleaner first. Then if you still see the problem, try using the other suggestions to determine the cause and find a solution.