BSOD help

CarlTR6 said:

Wait a couple of days to see what your system does, then we can consider driver verifier. For now, stick with MSE and Windows Firewall. These will not cause BSOD's. Knowing how security suites entangle into a system, I do not recommend any of them. They drill into your system as deeply as malware. In essence, they act like a rootkit, albiet a good root kit. I am going to quote one of our esteemed members here who is also an MS MVP. He is is very experienced with Window's OS's and has done a whole lot of testing with security suites.

My theory revolves around the enhanced security that came about in Vista when the user tokens were split. A "user-admin" account in Vista & Windows 7 runs with a single user token. When full admin rights are needed, elevation occurs via consent.exe (UAC) and the 2nd token is obtained for the particular function requiring full admin permission. Only the single Hidden Admin user account (SID = x-500) runs with both user tokens in Vista & Windows 7.

Certain system services run under the "Local Account". The firewall drivers run in kernel mode under NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM and can block local NETBIOS ports used by system services, resulting in APPHANGs, which after 30000ms, becomes an APPCRASH.

- Windows Explorer or IE8 screen background fading white
- small blue circle spinning endlessly
- The phrase "..Not Responding..." appears
- WERCON screen appears and asks about reporting, close program, check online for solution, restart the crashing app, etc...

In XP, all admin accounts run with 2 user tokens = full admin rights; hence the reason Zone Alarm, NIS, KIS, MIS, N360, et al., do not have problems. Only 1 level of security to deal with.

I have always held that the differing levels of security in Vista/ Windows 7 make it extremely difficult for Internet Security Suites to function normally (as in XP).

Food for thought!
J. C. Griffith

The only thing I do not like about MSE is the lack of an email scanner. I use Avast which generally works well with most Win 7 systems. It was purposely designed to do so. But I have seen it cause BSOD's on a few systems.

If you are looking for good firewall protection, purchase a router - even if you have just one computer. Routers have built in hardware firewalls which, when properly configured, are far better than any software firewall. I do use a software firewall because of another computer on my LAN. That protects me should my wife get a nasty and vice versa.

Thanks for the detailed post. Appreciated.

I'll use MSE for a while. I'm don't use emails much. So that shouldn't be a problem. I do have an ADSL router for my broadband.

I might not get BSOD's for a few days anyway as I got 3 BSODs in like a time period of 50 days. So they aren't frequent. Anyway, after a few days I'll check the verifier and get back to you.

Thanks for the help. Cheers!

CarlTR6 said:

You are welcome. If Driver Verifier has not triggered a BSOD in three days, turn it off.

Wait a minute...Do I need to turn on the Verifier? It's already off. I haven't checked it yet after uninstalling those three programs. Should I check it now itself?

So I ran verifier again and it gave me a BSOD. I went to safe mode and got the minidump and then disabled verifier. The system is running REALLY slow. It took me a few minutes just to open My Computer in safe mode. On rebooting normal mode wasn't any better.

I'm on XP as I post this and it's lagging a bit but better than seven. This is very weird. Can it be a RAM issue? As the BSOD said something like dumping physical memory

Here's the minidump:

And after all that happened...I come to know that E drive isn't accessible. It says you need to format it when I double click on it. There was 150GB of data on it.

I have four partitions C(Win7), D(XP), E and F. What the hell just happened in the last hour?

Update: I formatted the E drive from XP and everything seems to be back to normal.

Now I'd like to know why the hell that happened? Thankfully the data I had there is present with many of my friends so recoverable.

CarlTR6 said:

You can leave Driver Verifier off. I haven't the foggiest idea what happened with your drive. That is interesting. I will take a look at your dump this evening and get back to you. Dumping physical memory is what happens in a crash. It is normal.

Alright, thanks mate. It's weird in so many ways. Why only E drive? Why the system went back to normal when the drive got formatted? Why am I so unlucky?

If this info is of any help, I used to install most of my programs on E drive and not the default C/Programs folder, including all the games.