keeps crashing / freezing

I had issues with my Thinkpad x61 Tablet and even filed a bug report on it. Turns out it was the Lenovo drivers, not Windows. Once I got a decent copy of the drivers, then everything worked fine!

OK, but 1) I'm running all the latest ThinkPad drivers, and 2) the backup worked fine AFTER I installed the drivers. It was only after I copied over \My Documents and installed Office, etc. that it stopped working, so I don't think the ThinkPad drivers are the problem.

dmex said:

Its interesting how its trying to create the same file on both your systems yet having the same problem, I would call this another confirmed bug in the RC release...

...

The problem you guys are experiencing is that one of the files VSS is trying to backup either doesn't exist in the source directory, has security permissions preventing a successful backup or has illegal characters in its filename...

I couldn't tell you the exact cause without trying to reproduce and isolate the exact problem but they are the usual causes of failure's to call CreateFile.

Steven

Steven,
I have exactly the same messages in my eventlog, even with the same filename (although part of the message is in Dutch, after switching from English to Dutch and back). My system is Windows 7 RC1, 32 bit.

VSS Service is set to manual, and some entries before this message VSS is creating an event 8224 telling "it is shutting down due to idle timeout".
I have no crashes, just messages in the eventlog (a total of 10 now, starting on May 9 when i did a fresh install).

I didn't do anything with backup yet, haven't used it, and wonder why i still get these messages in my eventlog.

Any idea?
..Pogo..

Through process of elimination, I finally figured this out. The culprit was Microsoft PhotoDraw V2, but here is the interesting part:
1. I only set Backup to back up \Favorites. That's it, nothing else. No app data, no other directories, no system image, just \Favorites.
2. I ran the backup, and it failed with the above error.
3. I uninstalled Photodraw and it worked.
4. I reinstalled Photodraw and it did not.

I have no idea why PhotoDraw bits sitting on a hard drive will mess up a backup when the backup isn't backing up those files, but it does.

Clearly, when VSS tries to create a shadow copy in Win 7, it's coming across some registry entry or whatever that's causing it to hang. This didn't happen in Vista, so it's clearly a Win 7 bug.

I have had this same error too, many times with Win 7:

Express Writer error: failed while adding express writers from directory System.

Operation:
Initializing Writer
Gathering Writer Data
Executing Asynchronous Operation

Context:
File Path: C:\Windows\Vss\Writers\System\
Execution Context: Requestor
Current State: GatherWriterMetadata

Error-specific details:
Error: CreateFile("75DFB225-E2E4-4d39-9AC9-FFAFF65DDF06.xml"), 0x80070002, The system cannot find the file specified.

awalt said:

I have had this same error too, many times with Win 7:

Express Writer error: failed while adding express writers from directory System.

Operation:
Initializing Writer
Gathering Writer Data
Executing Asynchronous Operation

Context:
File Path: C:\Windows\Vss\Writers\System\
Execution Context: Requestor
Current State: GatherWriterMetadata

Error-specific details:
Error: CreateFile("75DFB225-E2E4-4d39-9AC9-FFAFF65DDF06.xml"), 0x80070002, The system cannot find the file specified.

I also have the same Express Writer error message in my Event Viewer log in Windows 7 RC Build 7100.

Wish Microsoft would fix this before October 22, 2009!

The only way to tell is if you DL and install the FREE 90 Day version of 7600 RTM, and upgrade so you will not be using 7100 RC, which was BUGGY as hell.