I don't remember having this problem before, been using VLC for a while...anyway, here is the story...
When playing movies from any source, VLC will crash at random points - just stop working completely - and freeze in the classic windows "not responding" stage. However, what's not so classic is that it:
a) cannot be shut down at all. Attempts to use task manager to end either the application or the process or the process tree all end in failure. All the right "end task" etc windows pop up, but nothing ever comes of it - the crashed VLC instance just stays there until the computer is hard-rebooted.
and,
b) as soon as VLC crashes, no new programs can load, regardless of program type, dev etc. Any and all programs that are executed after the crash load into memory and can be seen in the taskbar processes list, but do not appear on the screen or in the running applications list. Furthermore, these programs too cannot be end task'ed after they quasi-loaded.
I'm guessing it's nothing to do with drivers/codecs since the problem seems to encompass nearly the entire PC once it happens, but it's bugging the @*#%* out of me, because it basically means that every time I use VLC I risk having to hard-reboot my PC with no alternatives.
Any ideas?