XBox 360 freezes when you sign into live? Read the solution here!

Does your Xbox 360 freeze as soon as you sign into live? This started happening to me last night. The second I would sign into XBox Live, the system would freeze. Only thing I could do was power cycle. If I unplugged the network cable it would boot up fine. It would then freeze when I’d plug in the network cable and try to sign back into Live.

At this point I assumed my third 360 was about to Red Ring, as I am sure anyone else who has ever had to send back a 360 would think the same. However, as it turns out my Xbox 360 is not quite ready to die, yet — probably has a few more months of life left.

Here is the problem. When I first signed into Live last night I went to the market place and started to download the “PES” demo. At some point while it was downloading the demo in the background I decided to play a game and booted up Halo 3, which when you go into Matchmaking the 360 stops any active downloads. This is also the first time my system froze. From there, anytime I would boot up and sign into Live (it automatically signs in) my 360 would freeze.

Solution:

1: Unplug your network cable or wireless adapter
2: Go into the system blade, then memory, then hard drive
3: Delete the “PES” demo download (it has the exclamation mark contained within a yellow triangle)
3a: You might need to delete ANYTHING that has the exclamation mark)
4: Plug in your network cable or wireless adapter
5: Sign into Xbox Live or reboot

Obviously something is funky with that specific demo when it tries to resume your download, or something is going on behind the scenes with the live service. Maybe something was overlooked during their big update a few days ago and a bug as introduced.

Hopefully this has fixed your issue and you can resume killing newbs.