Hi guys – thanks for the replies. I would have come back sooner but I didn’t get a notification email that the thread had been replied to.
After some work I managed to track the issue down and, you won’t believe it, but the root cause of it was a recent Laser printer driver from Lexmark.
Fortunately the problem got worse and killing off processes one by one revealed that when the spooler service was killed everything worked perfectly. I verified this with a re-start and then removed printers, one by one, until I confirmed that the Lexmark driver was the culprit.
I suspect (but don’t know 100% for certain) that the issue was caused by having an option checked in the driver telling it to register the printer share in Active directory.
I can say (100% for certain) that the driver was causing a spooler service lockup on system start and that this was preventing a lot of other services from starting. Probably the root of that was it not being able to register the printer in AD and then preventing the spooler service from completing startup (and the subsequent services that depend on it).
Removing the driver fixed it, re-installing the driver (this time without enabling it to register the printer share in Active Directory) has enabled everything to work perfectly once again.
I suspect the video freezing was being caused by the driver trying to, on an irregular basis, register the printer share in Active Directory. The odd thing is there was no CPU usage spikes etc during the freezing.
Bottom line – everything is peachy and most likely the setting telling it register the printer in AD was causing the issue.
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