How to Reproduce:
Start various Applications:
- Chrome (open at least 20 Tabs from different websites)
- Thunderbird (connect to at least one IMAP-Mail-Account)
- Some Music-Player, Play ogg- or mp3-songs
- Open up X11 (from cygwin)
- Open up some mintty-Terminals keeping varios ssh connections open
- Start a compiler in background
- Start VMware Workstation e.x.p build-1140354
- Open at least one virtual machine, do some work wit it, shut it down
- After it has shut down close it, then open a second virtual machine
From time to time the whole system will freeze, no mouse, no keyboard. Pressing CTRL-ALT-DEL will bring up the awaited screen. Pressing any of the buttons makes the system freeze again. This time completely: mouse is movable, you'll see a reaction on pressing Num-Lock, but nothing will happen. Waiting hours doesn't change anything - the system keeps unresponsible. The only way out: reset it.
I've only seen this, if some higher priorized application accessing the disk while VMware Workstation wants to access it too. VMware Workstation seems to never get back again and block all further IO.