It's now the second time an Office 2013 enterprise change creates a 'system restore' mess. The symptoms are: Opening the system restore gui where the restore points can be selected causes a system freeze. Started applications remain accessible, the start menu, task manager can no longer be accessed. The system then continuously degrades to a complete hang, locking Lync, Desktop, Taskmanger, IExplore. Weird enough, Outlook remains accessible, also Firefox or Word. Cold start is not possible, only battery removal on the notebook helps. A freeze trigger is also the usage of Lync.

As the help desk knows not more then the usual 're-image' I am asking here for further help/hints to get the issue solved. My assumption: Office 2013 enterprise changes cause major changes in the restore point procedure (shadow copy) which takes long to be completed. Until this is not done the system remains in this weird state.

The event viewer only shows the power loss events from my removing the battery.

the best way to test this is at safe mode, it will only run minimum service that you needed to run system restore, so it will automatically isolate 3rd party software issue

If performing system restore still freeze at safemode, means there is something to do with hardware, HDD I suspected

• Edited by britishdhez 4 hours 9 minutes ago