Using this ghost window, the user can only move, minimize, and - most importantly - close the unresponsive application, but not change its internal state. In that case use the jstack utility (see 2.11 jstack Utility ) to obtain a thread dump. My W8 Enterprise was driving me mad because it was freezing every 2 minutes. The freezes I experienced were for my normal HDD. Sublime Text: A Programmer’s Text Editor for the Rest of Us, http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/177819-ahci-link-power-management-enable-hipm-dipm.html, http://superuser.com/questions/471102/change-from-ide-to-ahci-after-installing-windows-8, http://scottiestech.info/2012/09/01/windows-8-freezes-or-hangs-the-fix-that-worked-for-me/comment-page-1/#comment-2984, http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2013/04/16/10411267.aspx, http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2665946/th#LetMeFixItMyselfAlways, How to Easily Print a Large Image to Multiple Pages in Windows, Fix the grey X on shortcut icons in Windows, Fix UEFI BIOS boot problems on a new motherboard, Make Your DVD or Blu-ray Player Region-Free. Since the SATA drives (running AHCI mode) were set to enable “hot swap” in the BIOS and LPM was disabled in PCI power management there have been no further instances. Only two of them had this problem. This is a bug that should never have made it into the RTM version of Windows 8. I’m not holding my breath…. It is merely that Client Hyper-V does in fact virtualize just about everything. See "Introducing Windows Error Reporting" for a brief overview. If a thread dump can be obtained, then a good place to start is the thread stacks of the threads that are in the runnable state. You can disable the ghosting feature in your application via a call to DisableProcessWindowsGhosting ().