# [Resolved] Hourglass won't go away



## rds33 (Nov 19, 2001)

For the past few days when I load FREECELL, the hourglass appears and won't go away.

1) I restored FREECELL from a 2-month old save. Same problem.

2) Reinstalled Win98se. No improvement.

3) Ran SFC. Restored 1 file. No help.

4) The other games, Solitaire, Hearts etc continue to run fine.

5) If I have a bad .DLL, why doesn't it affect the execution of other programs?

-RDS33


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## Rollin' Rog (Dec 9, 2000)

Do a ctrl-alt-del and end task everything but Explorer and Systray.

Does the problem still occur?

If not, run *msconfig* to disable suspected startups under the startup tab for further testing.


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## rds33 (Nov 19, 2001)

Excellent! After terminating all tasks, FREECELL resumed working.

Now I'm going to terminate each process one at a time to find the "guilty" party.

I'll start with Norton antivirus and work from there ...

Thanks.

I'll post a progress reply when I've learned more.

RDS33


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## Rollin' Rog (Dec 9, 2000)

Some pop-up blockers can mess with it, panicware is one, I believe.


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## rds33 (Nov 19, 2001)

The offending process was EM_EXEC - my Logitech optical mouse
controller.

I had upgraded the software and driver in an attempt to solve a problem whereby the mouse moves in a jerky fashion as though some force were holding it back from where I want to move it. That problem remains.

I cut back to the previous release of software and the FREECELL problem has gone away.

Thank you very much for your help!

I shall pass this information on to several similar posts on other forums.

RDS33


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## Rollin' Rog (Dec 9, 2000)

You're welcome. For what it's worth I'm using a Logitech USB Optical on my WinXP system and play FreeCell all the time. It does not run Em_Exec though. Installed by Dell, it actually uses a Microsoft XP client driver. 

What a world of difference an Operating System makes


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