I'm finding it very difficult to Google this, I don't seem to be able to find anyone with the same issue and I don't know enough about the Windows operating system to troubleshoot. The machine(s) we are seeing the problem on are Windows 7 (professional) both 64bit and 32bit.

The problem is with the command prompt freezing up, seemingly randomly. When it does freeze nothing will bring it back to life (i.e. keypress) and it's nothing to do with Quick Insert mode either. It doesn't seem to be when I run standard commands, such as cd, dir, etc, but when I run different programs from the command line.

The annoying thing is that sometimes the prompt will freeze and at other times it won't, using the same program/command in the prompt. To add to the frustration, one of my colleagues who had the same problem seems to not have experienced it for a few days now (we're pretty heavy on the command line). It's not a VPN/RDP thing as suggested in other questions and forum posts, as I've seen this both locally and remotely.

I thought it was to do with the return code signifying an error or some error state in the program, i.e.:

C:\Users\leonardc>mysql -u lalala
ERROR 1045 (28000): Access denied for user 'lalala'@'localhost' (using password:
 NO)

but this isn't always the case either. In fact the above command hasn't crashed the shell before.

Elevating the prompt to run as Administrator doesn't seem to have any bearing on the problem either. Disabling my anti-virus doesn't have an effect either.

Update: I tried the same commands in PowerShell, but I still get the same problem, it will freeze at random times (more often than not, as with the command prompt, but not always). It's not the same as command prompt in the fact that one might work while the other doesn't, but then the next time I try run the same command in both it will suddenly be different again.