How to exclude every process in Sysinternal’s Process Monitor in the filter except for one process

Use RegFromApp instead. Attach it to the MMC.exe that runs gpedit, and click on the green arrow to start logging. If you change the entries, the tool generates a .reg file that you can save and use later again.

It sounds like a race condition or dead lock.

I.e.: SW1 and SW2 must have a communication protocol with requests and acks. If this protocol is not well designed, there can ben a race condition, in which packets are not send in the correct order. SW1 get stacked waiting for a packet from SW2, but which SW2 has already sent in the past (and SW1 missed it) and SW2 is not going to send it again, becoming to a lock state on SW1.

If this is the case, the failure depends on the execution speed of SW1 and SW2, and further more on the load of the servers. Let say, if both processes are executing slowly, it's more difficult that SW1 misses the packet from SW2 which creates the lock state. Running the system monitor slightly slow the whole system down, which might be enough to make this work.

As for the different servers, if the first sever has more load than the others, then there you have, it works.