“My start menu was hung due to the combination of heap corruption and WerFault.exe deciding that it needed to upload the crash dump before releasing the old process so that a new one could be started.”
Bruce Dawson’s laptop has an SSD and 32GB of RAM, and launching Notepad from the Start menu took about a minute. The search process crashed from heap corruption, and Windows Error Reporting held it hostage for 15.572 seconds while it uploaded the dump over hotel WiFi. CPU and disk sat almost 100% idle the whole time. Microsoft’s crash reporter decided sending itself telemetry mattered more than giving the user his Start menu back.