System freeze when removing USB Drive and disconnecting VPN

My Win7 x64 system freezes (most but not every time) when I remove USB thumb drives and when I disconnect from a VPN connection.

I'm using OpenConnect-GUI VPN client. It uses OpenVPN's TAP driver/virtual device.

I always use the Safely Remove Hardware icon when removing a USB device.

The only changes I've made to my system, since this started, are updating to the latest version of ESET and I believe I restored the system from a VMWare Windows Agent backup image. This is a physical machine. The restored image was a backup of the same machine.

Nothing in the Event log or any other log that I can find. No BSOD. The system freezes. If sound was playing at the time of the freeze, I get a very fast stuttering sound. I have to do a hard reset.

I'm stumped. What is common with both triggers is the fact that devices are being removed when it freezes.

mrjimphelps said:

Have you tried using MSCONFIG to disable the non-Microsoft services, to see if that fixes it?

Thanks for the suggestion. I did this and the issue still occurs. The ESET service cannot be disabled.

I ran "sfc /scannow" but no errors were found. I updated all drivers and still happens. I even restored a backup of this install onto a different PC (same model/hardware). Issue occurs on that PC as well. I even wiped the original PC and performed a fresh install of Win7 and the issue does not occur so I think hardware can be ruled out.

I really need to keep this install because it has a ton of applications and settings that cannot be simply backed up and restored to a fresh install.

Dumps are not created and no BSOD. Is there anyway to capture the event that's causing the issue?

I sometimes get the following entries in the Event viewer when plugging in a USB thumb drive:

Code:

Event ID:      Error:
7011              A timeout (30000 milliseconds) was reached while waiting for a transaction response from the LanmanServer service.
7011              A timeout (30000 milliseconds) was reached while waiting for a transaction response from the ShellHWDetection service.
11                The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Harddisk6\DR6.
11                The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Harddisk6\DR7.

When this happens, it takes a few minutes for the autoplay dialog to pop up and for the drive to become visible in Explorer. This happens at least 50% of the time but the computer does not crash. Sometimes only an 11 event is recorded.

Just wanted to post a follow up.

I tried absolutely everything I could to find the culprit. I tried every version of driver for all devices, replaced on-board devices with cards (one-by-one), repair installs of Windows, fresh installs of Windows, tested and replaced RAM, ruled out overheating, even bought a new PC with a different chipset but the crashes always came back.

As amazing as it sounds, the issues were caused by the SRWare Chromium browser. I failed to notice that the issues only occurred when the browser was open. It took me forever to realize that was the only common factor The browser could be open in the background for a few seconds or hours before a crash would occur. I simply stopped using the browser about two weeks ago and have encountered zero issues/crashes. I finally uninstalled it a couple of days ago.

I did not see any other reports. Hard to believe I'm the only one. Problems started about 2-3 versions ago. I tried enabling/disabling hardware acceleration but it made no difference.

This was so hard for me to "pin down" because the issues occurred intermittently. I can't tell you how many times I thought I had solved the issue. I would start from a fresh Windows install, install one app at a time, test for a few days and continue adding my apps and tweaking my settings one-by-one and then BAM... I'd get a crash.

Hope this helps others.

Others may be having the same issue, but it is so intermittent that they haven't figured it out.

Good catch.