Edge and Chrome freezes while browsing making Windows not responsive for 1 minute follow by Windows explorer behave strangely

Update: Randomly I turned on Hardware acceleration (after having it off since finding this thread to stop the freezing), and in the past day, I've had no freezing!!

Anyone else who had the issue, try turning hardware acceleration back on and see if its working / not freezing anymore.

Not sure what came down or changed.

EDIT: 48 hours later and for me, the issue appears to have disappeared / not come back since I posted the update.

Happy about it but disturbed I still don't know the root cause (and for someone who supports his whole extended family with tech, that is troublesome).

Interesting.  I have a AMD Radeon HD 6700 Series in there now and it sees the issue.

When I first assembled the machine I had my kids Nvidia card (much newer) in there and I was not seeing the crash.  When he reclaimed his card I had to stick the old Radeon in there since the Ryzen 7 does not have integrated graphics.  

I thought the card may be the issue given the workaround for disabling the hardware acceleration.  If I could get a decent video card this would not be a problem, but absolutely nothing is available. 

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I'm thinking we may be onto something: graphics card being the culprit.

My motherboard's integrated graphics card was older than the AMD Radeon HD 6400 Series I have currently.  And I can't get a newer/faster one for this motherboard either to try as an alternative.

Interesting.  I have a AMD Radeon HD 6700 Series in there now and it sees the issue.

When I first assembled the machine I had my kids Nvidia card (much newer) in there and I was not seeing the crash.  When he reclaimed his card I had to stick the old Radeon in there since the Ryzen 7 does not have integrated graphics.  

I thought the card may be the issue given the workaround for disabling the hardware acceleration.  If I could get a decent video card this would not be a problem, but absolutely nothing is available.

I have the same issue on a newly built machine, new copy of Windows as of yesterday.

I can recreate the issue on demand.  Open Chrome (or Edge) and search "Adobe illustrator"  then click Buy now.  It will freeze for a about a minute and then come to life again.  It will happen with other sites too, but the adobe buy now will make it happen every time.

Viewing the process explorer, I see other threads still active and clicking on items in the bookmarks bar does cause process to spawn and die, though nothing happens on the screen.

It is a new machine but has an older graphics card in it for now.

Thanks for this, I tried it and the "on demand" recreation paramaters you showed trigger the same freeze event for me, IMMEDIATELY.

I will say my graphics card is older AMD Radeon HD 6400 Series, as you mentioned that fact too.  But then again my whole machine is "older" AMD Phenom II X4 960T 3Ghz.

Wonder if enabling overclocking would have any effect?  I use AMD Overdrive to overclock sometimes (as my bios is retail ASUS / won't allow bios configurable overclocking).

I assuming that you are using Intel based CPU? I could be wrong. But in between both Intel and AMD, it seems like this issue are more obvious in AMD CPUs. As my work PC is Intel's I5 while at home it is AMD CPU.