What could be the cause of so many application hangs?

Answer 1

Application hang are caused by many different things. Example 1 a full hard drive,2 not enough memory "RAM", 3 spy-ware and viruses.
First check your hard drive for free space. Today anything below 500MB of space left on the drive will drive one Batty. If this is your case then remove old or unused not needed applications from the control panel's "add and Remove Software" Icon.

Also anything below 128MB of RAM can take one to the insane asylum. Check Start settings, control panel then go to Settings. Here you should see the OS, Processor type and how much ram you have. If too low then consider adding up to or above 256, If your system allows you to.

Last but not least, Have your Anti virus Updated, I do every day. And find a suitable Antyspyware program. You must run the antiviral program to find virus, updating is not enough. I use SPYBOT S&D for malware "Antyspyware" Go to GOOGLE and in the search field put in "Spybot S&D" go to the site and download it. It is free. You have to download from a mirror site. install follow instructions and let it run. it will probably find from 50 to 400 spyware in your Pc. Once done click on fixselected. and Wala you may have Happy pc working. :) Hope this works Will.

Answer 2

There are so many things that can go wrong that it might be impossible to find all of the different causes.

Answer 3

Without knowning any relevant information, I would hazard a guess and say severe fragmentation of your drive, and way too many temp files. Run clean disk, then defrag.