TSGL: Hintform

[Don Penlington]

Here's one I reckon will have y'all stumped. (O me with little faith)

3 days ago, XPSP2 was locking up. This just started out of the blue. 
Nothing recently installed, neither hardware nor software that might have 
caused this, as far as I can see.

It would freeze for maybe a minute (seems like an hour when you're waiting 
staring at the screen like an imbecile). then would unfreeze for a second 
or 2, then refreeze. I managed (twice) each time with a lot of patience to 
get into Task Manager to shut down.

The first "End Task--not responding" window to come up each time was 
entitled "Hintform". Not hintform.exe, just plain hintform.

After waiting forever, I finally had to power off in order to close.  Not good.

After rebooting, the computer was as normal. I searched the whole computer 
for hintform, but no result.

I then googled hintform, where I found 2 similar incidents with no useful 
answer other than to say it "might" be something to do with 
Javascript---not at all helpful. Google also refers to several 
Javascripting sites, where it seems that "hintform" is a normal java 
programming instruction.

Ran antivirus and 3 antispyware scans. Nothing showed up there.

I then searched 9 more of my usual tech helpsites (including TSG) for 
Hintform, but all returned zero result.

Next day, I noticed that the same behaviour occurred shortly after I'd been 
using Eudora. I've been using the same Eudora version for 12 years, since 
W95, and if it is the culprit, it's the first time it's ever gone wobbly. 
Again the same Hintform when trying to close via Task Manager.

Strangely, running Task Manager just before closing (again after consuming 
much time and patience) showed no sign
of anything remotely like hintform as a running application.  Looking in 
the Eudora folder shows no files with that name.

With a little Divine Intervention, I figured that since Eudora was the last 
major app I'd been running before each lockup, maybe if I uninstalled and 
reinstalled it (yes, I did save the mailboxes and addresses) it might 
resolve the problem.

Since I did that (yesterday) the problem hasn't occurred again.

As far as I know Eudora does not use java---but I know nothing of 
programming, so I could easily be wrong.

In case this thing rears its ugly head again, does anyone here have any 
clues what "hintform" is, where it came from, and what it's doing on my 
beloved computer.?

Of course, hintform may be a complete red herring, and the cause could be 
something entirely different ( but why did it show up as "not responding" 
in Task Manager?)

In any case, I'm very curious.

This may or may not be connected, but my bios is still not detecting my 
second hard drive at each reboot unless I tell it to autodetect each time. 
Although it's set to the default autodetect, it sometimes now doesn't 
detect any hard drive at all. A check of the new Samsung hard drive found 
no errors.

Finally, is there any way, or any utility, that can get into bios and reset 
it while XP is running?

Would "flashing" the bios do any good? I've never done that, so would need 
some guidance at infant level.

Don Penlington