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We'd only be able to test 100% with a null modem cable and a remote kernel debugger, but when a system hangs hard and it can't be dumped via a PS/2 keyboard (which is operating at the hardware interrupt level), it's almost always a hardware error. It could be that the windows kernel is so hung that it isn't accepting interrupts at the driver level anymore (rare with the NT kernel, but still possible), but I'd say it's quite likely you've got yourself a hardware problem. Can you install a second copy of Windows on a separate partition and see if you get the same hanging behavior? Also, checking your memory for errors, making sure you aren't overclocking anything, etc. would be a good road to travel down as well.

WBAT is great for that.

If you feel like you want to install a hotfix that has not been regression tested as well as public hotfixes, call Microsoft with this issue, and ask for 927891 (they may ask you for an adplus dump of the process while using high CPU, and you can do that ahead of time by following the application "hanging" instructions here).

jiggysmb, I would suggest gathering a dump of Dreamweaver via adplus as per the instructions here, and then either post the dump here (compressed), or, if it's too large, PM me and I'll give you a location to upload for analysis.

I would again recommend following my post above, because that hotfix isn't going to resolve your issue (if you had the issue that hotfix mentioned, you'd know it - the service would crash constantly, not just a few times a day).

Hm - OK, well, I think at this point only a dump of the machine in state (or at least an attempt to get a dump) will suffice to resolve this. If you have a PS/2 keyboard attached (or can attach one for testing), configure your machine for a complete memory dump as per these instructions. The next time you either have the video go dead on boot, or have a complete system freeze, hold down the RIGHT hand CTRL key, and press the SCROLL LOCK key twice (all while holding down that CTRL key). If you don't have a hardware problem, your box should bugcheck with a STOP 0xE2 and create a memory dump and reboot. If you have a PS/2 keyboard attached and the box does NOT bugcheck when you do this key combination, you most likely have a hardware problem and should start troubleshooting from there. In fact, after you've configured for a complete dump, you might want to try it while the system is working just to make sure you've got it down and it works. If you've got any questions, let me know.

That means that one of the svchost.exe "service hosts" on your machine is crashing. I'd say making sure your machine was clean would be a good idea, but assuming that your machine is clean, do the following to gather a dump of it the next time it crashes with userdump: 1. Download Userdump. 2. Double-click the downloaded file to extract the userdump installation files. By default, these will extract to C:\kktools\userdump8.1. Please click "Yes", then "Unzip" to extract the files. 3. Double-click the "setup.exe" file located in C:\kktools\userdump8.1\x86 to install the userdump utility. Please select the defaults when possible, and make certain to select the "Enable dump on process termination" feature when prompted. NOTE: You may need to reboot the machine at this point for the installation to complete successfully. 4. Create a folder called C:\userdump. 5. Once installed, you will find a new icon in your control panel called "Process Dump". Please open this utility. 6. When the userdump window opens, please click the "New" button. 7. Please enter "svchost.exe" in the "Application name:" dialog box, and click "OK". 8. Click on the new listing for "svchost.exe", and click the "Rules" button. 9. Select the "Use custom rules" radio button. 10. Type "C:\userdump" in the "Dump file folder" dialog box. 11. Click the "All Exceptions" box. 12. Click the "OK" button. 13. Click the "Apply" button, then click "OK". You should have a .dmp file (or series of .dmp files) in C:\userdump the next time it crashes. These memory dump files will help us in determining what caused the process to crash.

If you are using a DHCP server to assign IP and DNS information, this shouldn't be a problem when those laptops go to a different location (likely those other broadband routers are providing IP and DNS via DHCP as well) - if you're statically assigning IP and DNS, strongly configure using DHCP. You're going to have to consider it, because having non-AD DNS servers on your clients (or worse, servers) will eventually cause AD to fail to work properly - AD is 99% reliant on valid DNS information. Since public DNS servers don't have information about your internal AD structure, your clients (or servers) will get confused, and you'll get all kinds of random errors like these. If you require each machine to have specific IP information each time it attaches to your network, use DHCP reservations to make sure that a specific MAC address gets the same DHCP IP lease each time it connects - but if you must go with static assignments, you MUST remove the public DNS servers while those machines are on your network, or you'll continue to have problems.

STOP 0x1a (same as a STOP 0xa): IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL Typically due to a bad driver, or faulty or incompatible hardware or software. Technically, this error condition means that a kernel-mode process or driver tried to access a memory location to which it did not have permission, or at a kernel Interrupt ReQuest Level (IRQL) that was too high. (A kernel-mode process can access only other processes that have an IRQL lower than, or equal to, its own.) STOP 0x4E: PFN_LIST_CORRUPT This indicates that the memory management Page File Number list is corrupted. Can be caused by corrupt physical RAM, or by drivers passing bad memory descriptor lists. STOP 0x8E: KERNEL_MODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED A kernel mode program generated an exception which the error handler didn’t catch. These are nearly always hardware compatibility issues (which sometimes means a driver issue or a need for a BIOS upgrade). Sounds like you've got a driver problem - and since it's going to be a kernel-mode driver, you might start by uninstalling all antivirus/antispyware software running on the machine, and upgrade the rest of your hardware's drivers to the latest versions to see if it helps. I'd also strongly suggest running your memory through a memory test, and make sure you aren't overclocking any components as well. Otherwise, configure your machine for a complete memory dump and I'll analyze it the next time the issue occurs.

That is a bit odd - so you still have symptoms of system freezes?

Only Home Premium and Ultimate have Windows Media Center, and not all versions come with the base games package. Also note that only Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate allow non-solicited RDP connections. Attached is a pretty good rundown of the differences between all versions, as an Excel 2003 XML file. Vista_Editions.xml

Actually, you almost always see this when the following is true: 1. There are large files on the drive, large usually (but not always) being hundreds of megabytes in size 2. There is not a lot of free space on the disk 3. The image is being created on a network share If the above is true, you can (and sometimes do) get these errors. Basically what happens is that the size of the largest file currently on the disk being imaged is larger than the amount of free space left on the disk at the time of the error, and there's a reason this can happen. The design of imagex is to create it's temporary files in the same location as the WIM file being created, and this problem generally manifests itself when the location of the WIM file is a network share - in this case, the temp files are created on the disk that is being imaged itself. If the hard disk being imaged is very full, then there can be situations where there is not enough room to hold the temporary files, and you get error #2. The options you have, in these cases, is to image to a second hard disk, make sure that there are no large files on the disk being imaged, or make sure that there is ample free space (50% of the disk or more) on the disk being imaged to compensate for temprary file size issues.

That package doesn't support the regular hotfix switches, because it's technically not a Microsoft patch (it's for the Macromedia/Adobe/whoever owns it this year Flash player. It's packaged as an Iexpress package, and can be installed as per instructions on installing it that can be found from the "IT Professionals" link on the KB's page:

Broadcom makes 4401 drivers available on their website for x64: http://www.broadcom.com/support/ethernet_nic/4401.php

I would strongly suggest that you use autoruns to disable all non-Microsoft items and reboot, and see if the problem persists. If so, I would check to see if it still persists when booting in safe mode.

You wouldn't happen to have Daemon Tools installed, would you? That driver (sptd.sys) belongs to Daemon Tools, and is a Scsi PassThrough Driver (hence sptd) for the suite. That driver is notorious in it's own right for causing bugchecks and random system freezes, but if you have starforce drivers on your system (usually installed by a select set of Windows games for copy protection), you will get the very symptoms you are describing. Since the sptd.sys loads even in safe mode, it becomes an invalid test until you completely remove Daemon Tools and the sptd.sys driver. Good luck, you're gonna need it .

No, you cannot have different drivers for different profiles. You can load and unload different devices per hardware profile, but you can only have one driver installed for any device at any one time.

If that's the case, then this is expected behavior. Even if you are not connected to the domain, you still have to choose the domain object in winlogon to log in with that account. When you select the local machine's object, you're telling it to look in the local SAM, and the account won't exist. Since it sounds like your machine is caching your domain logons (and the default is to cache the last 3 logon sessions), you should have no trouble logging into your machine with a domain account even when not connected to the domain. Again, this is expected behavior - you have to tell your machine this is a (cached) domain account at the winlogon screen, otherwise it won't know what to do.

Assuming the programs don't dump binaries in the .NET folders, you should be able to remove and reinstall without issue. However, if apps place their own binaries in the .NET folders, a repair or reinstall of that application will be likely required.

You should NEVER include public DNS servers in your client configuration in your AD. Always configure DNS on your DCs, and point your clients ONLY to your DCs. Then, in the DNS configuration on your DCs, set up your ISP's DNS server(s) as forwarders - this will keep you from having AD DNS problems internally, and your clients should then be able to browse the public internet via the forwarders in the DCs DNS configuration. AD relies almost entirely on DNS, and if you have non-AD DNS servers configured, they won't know anything about your AD - this will confuse clients eventually, if not right away.

If it's a multiboot MSDN or VLK CD, you'll need to actually make standalone versions of the CD for both server versions, or this will happen - I have seen instances where multiboot MSDN and VLK CDs cause this issue.

Is the disc used to create these installations a retail, OEM, royalty, or VLK CD?

Is the account a local account on the machine itself, or is it an account in your domain?

Looks like we're failing here: MSI (s) (68:B4) [18:25:18:468]: Invoking remote custom action. DLL: C:\WINDOWS\Installer\MSI57.tmp, Entrypoint: ScheduleNgenPostreboot 01/17/07 18:25:18 DDSet_Status: LANGID: 1033 01/17/07 18:25:18 DDSet_Entry: ScheduleNgenPostreboot started - Scheduling Ngen Postreboot Check 01/17/07 18:25:18 DDSet_Status: NgenExclusionList: aspnet_isapi.dll;aspnet_perf.h;aspnet_perf.ini;aspnet_perf2.ini;aspnet_regiis.exe;aspnet_wp.exe;c1xx .dll;c2.dll;CORPerfMonExt.dll;cscomp.dll;IEHost.dll;InstallPersistSqlState.sql;InstallSqlState.sql;I nstallSqlStateTemplate.sql;mscorld.dll;PerfCounter.dll;SmartNav.htm;SmartNav.js;SmartNavIE5.js;Syste m.Windows.Forms.tlb;UninstallPersistSqlState.sql;UninstallSqlStateTemplate.sql 01/17/07 18:25:18 DDSet_Status: Framework Version Path: C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\ 01/17/07 18:25:18 DDSet_Status: LANGID: 1033 MSI (s) (68!44) [18:25:18:562]: Note: 1: 2753 2: Microsoft_VisualBasic_Compatibility_dll_2_____X86.3643236F_FC70_11D3_A536_0090278A1BB8 01/17/07 18:25:18 DDSet_Error: Filetoken cannot be resolved to path. 01/17/07 18:25:18 DDSet_Error: ScheduleNgenPostreboot Failed 01/17/07 18:25:18 DDSet_Exit: ScheduleNgenPostreboot ended with return value 1603 Action ended 18:25:18: DD_CA_ScheduleNgenPostrebootCommit_X86.3643236F_FC70_11D3_A536_0090278A1BB8. Return value 3. I'd say you either had a failure during the initial installation of the .net framework 2.0 that is different than above, or an update to asp.net caused it (I believe the last one was 917283). Follow the steps here for manual removal of anything .net 2.0 related on your machine, then try the install again.

I can't tell you how many medium-sized businesses run this exact software stack - with a 3rd party antivirus and no System Center for monitoring. If this can be brought to a competitive price point, I think it'll sell REALLY well. SBS does really well, and taking that concept to the medium-sized business market and bringing all of the apps one might use in that scenario, and making it all gel in one MMC (I'd guess it'll probably end up being System Center-centric) is a really cool idea, at least IMHO.