I thought I'd do a wee update on my experience with this for anyone looking at it at a later date.....

The problem of WD hanging is still ocurring, which I guess eliminates Microsoft Customer Experience and Avast antivirus. The way I have dealt with it, is to reboot the laptop every 12 hours using a batch file consisting of one line ('reboot /r /f /t 00') executed by Scheduler.  By doing this, it highlighted another problem which has cropped up time to time. I use mapped drives to link my laptop running WD to my webserver. Now I don't know how many of you use mapped drives, but if you do frequently, you will commonly see the message "Cannot re-connect all network drives". This has ocurred in every version of Windows since XP and something Microsoft has never addressed. To connect the drive you have to open Explorer and click on it to relink. It doesn't happen all the time, but enough to be annoying.

WD reverts back to default as to where it creates the clientraw and web files if it cannot find alternative setups which is drive C:\wdisplay so I had to find a way to ensure my mapped drives were always available to WD at bootup time. Of course you can ftp the clientraw and web created files to other destinations, but I preferred to write them directly to the server.

I found on the net a useful batch file which I've named connectdrives.bat which checks the status of all mapped drives and reconnects them which I put in my startup folder to run each time the laptop boots up. Fine in theory, but WD set to start automatically always wanted to launch before my batch file restored the mapped drives.
To solve this, I unticked the box in WD for the program to launch at startup and created another batch file with a time delay which allowed connectdrive.bat to execute before WD.

Echo off
timeout 15 /nobreak
start "" " c:\wdisplay\weatherDisplay.exe
timeout 2 >nul
exit
 
If you'd like a copy of connectdrive.bat here is a link. http://www.portrobinson.nz/Download/connectdrives.txt I've renamed the file to connectdrive.txt. Just re-name the extension back to .bat.  Those familiar with batch files can incorporate the above into it to simplify the launch of WD.
Both files would need to be copied to your startup directory if you were going to duplicate my re-boot setup as well as creating a scheduled task to actually perform the reboot.

Rebooting my laptop every 12 hours seems to have stabilized everything for the time being. Long may it remain so!!

TC