Goldmine Freezing when dong certain tasks

Is it happening from all machines? Is it reproduceable? Can you see this behavior on the server itself? (This latter question is to eliminate the network as an artifact or potential cause of the problems.)

You could run a SQL trace (beyond my skill to describe how to set this up... gmgenius?) to see if anything untoward is happening in your SQL engine.

Does it happen with any other applications you're running on this server?

Is anyone on your system trying to run the built-in GoldMine reports? Some of these (i.e. any report pulling History data) can kill your server response.

After-hours test: power down all the computers on your Lan and test GoldMine directly on the server for a while. If it runs fine, then it's one of your users or one of their computers that's doing it to you.

Network problems could include bad NICs causing excess chatter and traffic. A workstation could have a virus causing it to spew stuff into your router. (These may be unlikely, but easy enough to rule out with the after-hours test.

This sounds more of a database issue.
Please add more hardware capacity to your database.

Ensure that you maintain your database to keep fragmentation at bay by re-indexing and defrag.

Maintain your usage statistics (run SP_UPDATESTATS and DBCC UPDATEUSAGE) of your database.

Ensure that your log files (for the database are not too big and that you adequately make log backups in case your recovery model is of type  "FULL"

Re-index and re-organize your data and index pages frequently.

Those should help you. In case you still have issues, then perform a health check on your database and post the results here.

Steven, Its happening mainly on the Sales Team's PC's, the issue is hard to reproduce, its not happening everytime they do an update which makes it that much harder to track the issue. The problem started when my machine crashed when trying to delete a loads of activities from one users activites list.
There is no monitor/keyboard on the server itself, only vnc/mstsc access so not sure if that would exhibit the same delays due to the latency of the remote software. Im going to check out of hours to see if the performance is any better.

Pastorchris, my skill set is very limited when it comes to SQL Databases, I wouldnt know how to execute your advice above, could you provide a bit more guidance?

Ive right clciked the GM Database in the Management and view the options, two out of the five options were set to True (AutoCreate Statistics and Auto Update Statistics)

Also, there was a maintenance plan already in place and in the decription details was as follows

Nightly - Check Integrity, Reorganise Index, Rebuild Index, Update Statistics, History Cleanup (disabled) and Full Backup of all HOGWARTS databases.

Its set to run each night at 21:15 so will have to wait until tomorrow.

Im going to order a book online now.

Also, you mentioned possible virus, I did put a new machine from storage out into the enviroment on Tuesday, this is when we first experienced the delay/freezes. Just scanning it now with NOD32.

Since making the changes to the database as per stevengraffs advice, Ive not had any further reports from the customer. Im in the office on Tuesday and will have a better idea then and at that point I will update this thread.

Pleae note that most of the work on Goldmine is back-end and the application has little work-load.
I suggest that you also ensure that you're using your hardware well and that  the hardware resources are sufficient for your database server on a busy day.

How to verify this? Run performance monitor at OS level.

Secondly, clear out any fragmentation at OS level especially the C drive and your database drive.

Using performance monitor, ensure that there isn't too much paging otherwise you will need more RAM.
Lastly, ensure that you have enough space for your swap files.

Sorry about the delay in awarding points, in the interim - other issue (non goldmine) surfaced.

All sorted now, thank you Steven