I was hoping to avoid a system reboot. It's just a nuisance, really.
When did this start happening, and was the system fine before that?
Does the hanging only happen during installs and heavy CPU usage, or would you equate this more as something that happens during installs and heavy I/O?
What kind of hard drive do you have, and is it in a RAID? (You can usually find this easily in device manager.)
How much ram do you have in the rig?
Desktop or Laptop?
You are either looking at a software problem or a hardware problem. The software fix is potentially a fresh install of windows since it is the easiest thing to do. (I would run check disk, and then update everything to the newest drivers first. Who knows, it may work.)
The hardware problems may have several solutions dependent on problem, and maybe it is as simple as updating settings in windows.
-Drive issues - older SSD causing studdering, drive failure, sector issues
-Board issues - overloaded bridges, connector or board going bad
-Chip - overheating, pipe degradation
-Ram issues - not enough ram, bad ram
-Cable issues - I've never seen a sata cable actually go bad, but this seems like something that might cause the problems you are seeing
-unrelated - some seemingly unrelated piece of hardware could be causing hanging issues. Graphics card, sound card, a different hard drive, DVD drive, etc.