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How old is the computer? What are your system specs? Computer brand is ZT, purchased in 1/2010. Processor is i7-920, 12gb memory, 1.0tb & 0.3tb disks; Win7 Home Prem (64-bit) with latest updates; NOD32 v6.

Thanks again for all the comments. These freezes are harder to capture with ProcMon than I expected, but I have three now. Two of them were NOD32 reading a file, but different files each time. The other was Firefox reading a file. I have concluded that my problem is likely hardware or system software, but probably not Win7 or NOD32. I suspect my system is going into a tight disk-read loop. The disk reads number in the tens of millions at the time of the freeze and are by far the most of any file during the entire ProcMon session. I have a few tweaks I can try first, but I am guessing a new computer is going to be the best choice. Therefore, I will mark this thread 'solved'.

Thanks for the responses. I can confirm that the problem persists with a clean reinstallation of v6. I am not an h/w or system s/w guru, but I am an application programmer. It's my belief that, even if NOD32 is accessing the disk when the freeze happens, Win7 should not allow it to peempt all keyboard and mouse input. Memory and disk intensive actions can make my system sluggish, but they should not make it totally unresponsive. I have seen or caused plenty of program loops. At first I suspected a hardware problem, and that still seems possible. If there were a problem with the disk controller, which I think is part of the motherboard, I can imagine that Win7 might be requesting a re-read over and over, thereby causing the freeze.

I wasn't aware that v6 was out and free for subscribers until I narrowed my suspicions to NOD32 and browsed support. I plan to upgrade as soon as I find a quiet time and a good backup. I am averse to running beta software for such an important function.

I'm running Win7 Home Premium (64-bit) and NOD32 v5. I have been having a problem whereby my system stops accepting keyboard and mouse input and spins the disk furiously for about 10 seconds or so. If I am playing music in the background, the music stops for a couple seconds. I have been using ProcMon from Microsoft to try to identify what the system is doing when the freeze happens. The system appeared to be accessing "C:\ProgramData\ESET\ESET NOD32 Antivirus\Updfiles\upd.ver" when the most recent freeze happened. Is this plausible? Has anybody else had this? Is there a fix? Thanks.