Does my computer just miss me or what?

[frau kaleun]

I am having a somewhat bizarre (to me) problem the past two days.

When I am at the computer actually doing stuff, everything seems fine. It boots up normally, any program I open runs fine, multiple progams open at the same time cause no problems, and I can't find any obvious evidence that there's anything wrong.

If I walk away from the computer and leave it idle for a while it shuts down and reboots while I'm away from it. I come back to the Windows login screen, log in, everything loads, and I get a message saying Windows has recovered from a serious error. Everything then works fine until I walk away again to do something else and come back to see it's shut down and rebooted all over again.

This happened 4-5 times last night. I fired it up, checked my email, surfed the web, went to get my laundry out of the dryer - shut down, reboot. Played some solitaire, checked in here, opened several things just to see if anything seemed "off" about performance, looked through the running processes in Task Manager to see if I saw anything I didn't recognize (I didn't), checked some other things, no clues. Went to make dinner, a few minutes later I hear a distinctive "beep" and come back and it's rebooting again. No problems doing anything after reboot completes, go to take a shower - shut down, reboot.

By the time I got done doing all the stuff I needed to walk away from it to do, it was too late to really get into troubleshooting. Came home tonight, turned it on, took care of my email, played SH3 for a couple of hours, checked in here, closed all but the background programs that are always running, went to eat dinner, come back, and it's shut down and rebooted itself again.

I sent the error report to Microsoft to see what info I'd get - last night did the same but got a web page saying it couldn't provide any. Tonight I got one saying there was problem with a driver that caused a blue screen error but it couldn't identify which one and that I should check for any available updates. I'm doing that right now, but nothing changed on this machine since before this problem started unless it happened without my knowledge - no new installations, no configuration changes, nothing that I can think of. I wasn't having this problem Sunday evening, it worked fine all day whether I was on it or it sat idle for hours, until I shut it down.

So I guess I'll install whatever updates I can find and see what happens, in the meantime if anybody's got any suggestions whatsoever about where to look... it just seems weird that the shutdown/reboot only happens after I walk away and it sits idle for a while. Which makes me think there's a problem with something that only runs when the computer is idle, which would mostly be auto backups and various scans and the normal utility type stuff that Norton 360 does all the time. I renewed my subscription with them a few days ago but that shouldn't have changed any settings or drivers. And I didn't change anything on it manually. I also looked through the various logs in Norton 360 to see if anything odd popped up but there was nothing that jumped out at me.

(Yeah I know a lotta geeky types don't like Norton - but I've used it forever and never had a problem with it, so telling me to ditch it and get some other programs that does what it does will not be considered helpful, lol.)