In week #5 – Jan 31, my Windows 10 computer updated. Immediately my Firestorm Viewer started freezing. Very annoying.

The viewer would freeze for 2 to 15 seconds, the screen would go black for a second then come back with everything working for a few seconds or minutes. Then things would go sideways again and the sequence would repeat. Basically, not usable.

Any teleport to a new region would trigger the sequence. So sailing and flying were impossible. Walking was hard enough.

I started my diagnostic process. Both Black Dragon and SL Default viewers had the same problem. Grid Status looked good. Only a few people were complaining of similar problems.

My computer seemed to be running well through the freeze as was network communications.

It appeared to be a viewer-only thing.

Firestorm support was helpful but not very informative. Their initial suggestion was to white-list Firestorm and its caches… OR… unlist and relist them. Uuummm… I suppose those helping me were thinking one lists individual files as exceptions to be ignored. With SL viewers I’ve found it best and way easier to list folders as the exceptions. But I did redo my AV exception list then restarted the computer. No help, as I suspected.

If you haven’t white-listed your viewer with your anti-virus, Firestorm, or another, here is the How To White List, Firestorm specific but this can be done with any viewer.

The FS Support was not flooded with requests for help with this problem so it seemed reasonable that the Windows Update had created a problem. I didn’t want to roll my system back. So, maybe the video driver.

I was on Nvidia’s 460 something driver, The new driver was 511.65 (2/2/2022). But that didn’t help. So, time to dig deeper.

Opening the Computer’s Task Manager (several ways to open – Ctrl-Alt-Delete is one). I found the C: drive was 100% busy… !?! Well, that is no good. So, what is the disk doing?

With the Task Manager open there is a link to Open Resource Meter at the bottom. In the meter, you can see what processes are using which resources. A file named srudb.dat was being filled with a load of data and holding the disk at or near 100% use. Plus, a load of sru log files were being created. So, what is this?

Some research and I find the Windows system process using the file is the Diagnostic Policy Service. This process searches the computer for problems and tries to sort them. People suggest the service be disabled when disk use becomes a problem.

I disabled the service in SERVICES. Just type ‘services’ into the Windows taskbar search. Find Diagnostic Policy Service in the list that comes up, which can take a minute to fill. Right-click the service and STOP it. Then right-click and select PROPERTIES. Change Automatic to Disabled. Exit out to your desktop. Done.

This seems to have fixed the problem.