You have just now double clicked on an application like Excel for example and sitting and waiting for quite a long time for it to open
. You are tired of watching the hour glass and you do not know what to do next. It is taking some unusual amount of time to respond and you open up the task manager from the task bar after some time and under the application tab you see the application running. You select the application and click on 'End Now' and see that the program is not responding. How annoying it is!! Before you opt for computer support, learn some more about this.
It is true that the problem could well be originating from some malicious software which is already there in your computer or else the hard-drive is so fragmented that the application is taking a longer time to open. The hard-drive stores the data in a way so that fragmentation often affects the time taken for the application to respond. There could be other reasons as well for a program not to respond.
If the OS has incompatibility issues with the software that you are trying to run or some background processes are running when you are trying to open, the software you might face a similar situation of non-responsive software. Is your software interacting more with the hard-drive instead of interacting with the RAM? I mean, it is possible that you are working on a very large file which is in your hard-drive and after small lengths of time you are going for a 'save'. If you had kept the file on your desktop temporarily while you are working on it then the processor would be interacting with the RAM instead of the hard-drive which is a slower device. Later on, after you have finished with your work, you could save it in your hard-drive.
Sometimes your anti-virus software blocks the software resulting in non-responsive program. In other cases, you do not have the right privilege to run the software resulting in a non-responsive program once again.
A wholistic approach towards computer maintenance can keep these situations away. Total uninstallation and reinstallation of the software might or even might not resolve the problem and it all depends on identifying the root cause.