Dell Precision laptop freezes with Creo/MATLAB on Win10 22H2; Task Manager stuck, shows 100% CPU; shutdown/restart hangs

I have a Dell Precision mobile workstation, and it has recently developed a strange issue. When I run relatively demanding standalone applications—such as Creo (3D CAD) or MATLAB—the system either freezes immediately or freezes after I get into the program and do a little bit of work. After I force-close the program, reopening it still behaves the same way; sometimes double-clicking related files won’t open anything at all.

Lightweight software such as Word, Excel, web browsers, or other small programs usually works fine. However, once the problem occurs, even Task Manager becomes unresponsive: its interface appears “stuck” and does not update in real time, some processes don’t show up completely, and it reports CPU usage at 100%. In reality the CPU is not actually maxed out—I verified with other diagnostic tools that usage is normal, and the CPU is not throttling; the frequency stays above 3.0 GHz.

When the issue is present, other basic operations also become slow or may hang—for example, launching other programs can be very sluggish or freeze during startup (these same programs can run normally when the issue is not happening). In addition, if the system is in this faulty state and I try any power-related action such as shutting down or restarting, it gets stuck on the “Shutting down…” / “Restarting…” screen indefinitely and never completes. The only way out is to force a hard power-off and then turn it back on.

I’ve already tried running built-in system scans (e.g., SFC/Scan commands), but they didn’t resolve the problem. Sometimes after a reboot it works for a while, but as soon as I run the applications mentioned above, the problem comes back.

I’m not sure whether this is caused by a Windows update, malware, hardware failure, or something else. Antivirus scans did not find any viruses. I would really appreciate help in diagnosing and fixing this issue. The OS is Windows 10 22H2. The system drive is an SSD, and the other drives are HDDs. The hard drive and memory don’t seem to have any obvious problems.