2nd time this has happened, have my music program playing and leave it for a while and when I come back the mouse can't click on anything in the program so I have to shut down and restart the music program, any ideas?

I'd say that the program is crashing...or at least locking up. I take it that if you are sitting there, then it will continue to work perfectly?

You can look in the Event Log and see if there is anything that shows up, but if it doesn't generate an error message, then it is going to be nearly impossible to figure out why it is doing this.

Is there an update/patch for the program?

I will look at the Event log next time that happens and I will email the software developer to find out if anyone had this problem before.

Out of curiosity... what music program is it?

OTSDJ

but please note that this is if not THE then one of the best most stable music programs ever which I have been using for the last 5 years or so but becuase with each upgrade can come some bugs, that's the only reason I am not ruling out a problem associated with the software.

And, which OS?

Oh sorry, XP Home

Did you have a look at the Event Log?

Not yet, at MJC's advice above, I had printed an article on this from MSKB and waiting to get the time to read through it carefully to know how to understand it.

Alright, I looked into reading and understand Event Logs and think I am making progress with it. In the Event Viewer under Application, I look back at Jan 13th but don't see any errors listed for that particular day but I did have a look at other errors and so now think I have an idea of what to look for next time this happens.

One thing I'd like to ask please concerning "how to search for a specific log event", let's say I wish to to know if there were any events for a specific application [OTSDJ], what entries do I put in each column of the view/find box?

If I'm looking for whether or not a particular program shows, I usually just put the name of the exe in the search box. But most of the time, since I don't let the logs get very large, I just go line by line...(yeah, I clear them about onceevery two weeks or so and since my system has been rather stable for quite a while, I don't get much in them...mainly DHCP errors when my ISP is acting up)

ok, the name of the music program involved here is OTSDJ. I pull up the "Find" box and leave the top two rows set to the default "ALL", the Find window looks like this

Event Source ALL

Category ALL

Event ID

User

Computer

Description OTSDJ

I type OTSDJ in the Description row and leave Event ID, User and Computer
blank, is this how it is suppposed to work?

Yeah...that looks right. That should filter the search to those times that particular item did something that shows up in the log.

Therefore since there were no errors on that day and time we can assume that the problem was NOT with OTSDJ and also since the search using the word OTSDJ came up empty?

Unless the error is in an associated dll. Run Process Explorer (http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/utilities/ProcessExplorer.mspx) and the music program to find the associated dlls. Also, it would be a good idea to clear the logs before you run it, that way if it does lock up, then you won't have to try to figure out if anything that show is possibly related...it should be easy to see.