cluberti

Does this happen for every application, or just certain applications? Also, does it happen right after a restart, or does it take some time for the issue to begin? One other question - when the issue occurs, how many other applications do you have running (including interactive services)?

My hal is a uniproc ACPI x64 PC.

Are you running XP, or vista? Also try installing with the /L command line option, specifying a log file as necessary to get the MSI logging.

Other people have posted similar issues on Nvidia hardware with vista builds, but have had more luck with the latest Nvidia drivers and RC2 - have you considered giving RC2 a try with the latest drivers to see what happens? That would be the first suggestion, as the betas (and to a lesser extent, RC1) haven't been at all kind to Nvidia hardware.

So far, in using RC2, I've found that under decent, everyday usage of the system, 1GB of RAM is not enough to keep Vista Ultimate or Home Premium happy. I've always used previous builds of Ultimate and Home Premium on machines with 4GB - 16GB of RAM (or more), but I figured that Vista would likely be installed on machines with 1GB of RAM or less for a good portion of the Vista userbase. I have an Athlon 3700+ machine with 1GB of RAM, no audio, and a Radeon x200 video chipset lying around usually doing testing before I christen code, or use it as a test of a new RIS build or OS image on "real hardware" outside of a VM to be certain it works properly, so I installed Vista Ultimate on it, both x86 and x64, to see how it performed. I hit the paging file so often on both x86 and x64 doing nothing more than web browsing, email in Outlook 2007, and once in a while using Windows Media Player or iTunes 7, that I was utterly appalled at how often I could completely slow the OS to an absolute crawl while the paging file was being hit, or NT volume information was being written to disk. If I moved the paging file to a different physical hard disk, obviously the problems went away completely. I could also alleviate the problems for the most part by bumping RAM up to 2GB on x86 and ~2.5GB on x64. I reinstalled both Home Premium and Ultimate - x86 and x64 versions both - several times, and upgraded a clean XP and XP x64 install twice, just to be sure, with similar results each time. In fact, I could make it happen right out of the box, nothing installed at all other than what came with a stock install, by opening only a few IE windows or tabs - if I then did something requiring UAC (like open perfmon), the issue would occur about 50% of the time. Of note, it didn't seem to matter whether I had full Aero enabled or was in Windows classic, nor did it seem to matter whether the disk used as the OS volume was a 7200RPM IDE or SATA drive, or a 10K SATAII drive, nor where I ultimately moved the paging file. I also have a USB key used with ReadyBoost during my testing, and it did not improve the situation at all when in use, nor was the performance any different without it during testing. I have previously experienced zero issues with Windows XP or Debian, x86 or x64, on this same hardware. Also note that all drivers installed on this machine were detected and installed during setup, and are correct for the hardware installed. Thus, I'm considering filing this as a serious RC2 issue, so I want to ask those of you running RC2 - has anyone else run into this particular scenario? Or perhaps it is just this machine? I worry that, if others are seeing this, it is likely that users getting an OEM machine from a vendor will only have one hard disk and run into this as well. Again, it could just be this hardware specifically that doesn't like Vista, so I wanted to ask.

Well, the obvious question is, what happens when you boot into safe mode or to VGA mode?

I'm assuming you attempted to install the downloads from the following URL: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/842773 You should only get that error when you have a package for an OS that you do not have installed. Note that none of the installers make a distinction between versions of Windows 2000 (OEM, VLK, or retail), so it shouldn't be a problem installing the update as long as your OS is reporting 5.1.2195 to the version check (which I'm assuming it is, if you were able to install Windows Installer 3.1). Did you use any tool to modify the installation of Windows 2000 before installing? Also, did the OS include a slipstreamed version of SP4 when you installed it, or did you install SP4 separately?

I beg to differ - what you are speaking of is virtual address space (not virtual memory, either - that's something different as well), in which (on x86 versions of Windows using the NT kernel) all running processes on the machine can be allocated up to 2GB of virtual address space. This has absolutely nothing to do with physical RAM, as the kernel memory manager determines whether or not an application's virtual address space (where the app loads and runs it's code) is mapped to RAM, virtual memory (paging file), or portions written to both. The boot.ini (and bcd binary boot file in Vista) switches that you are speaking of determine how the memory manager allocates it's 4GB of virtual address space, either 2GB for running processes and 2GB for the kernel or 3GB for running processes and 1GB for the kernel when the /3GB switch is used. Again, this has absolutely nothing to do with physical RAM, other than the fact that having more RAM in your machine means the NT memory manager has more physical RAM space to map virtual address space to memory pages. Read the book "Windows Internals, 4th Edition" by Mark Russinovich and David Solomon if you want to learn more about memory management and the Windows kernel.

Yeah, noticed that on RC2 when it was installed, although the desktop does say RC2. I'm actually not sure why that is, although originally RC1 was going to be the last release before RTM, so perhaps the guys and gals who build 5744 missed the RTM in the build number before this build was RC2'ed - I don't know for sure. It's funny though .

It can be, due to the fact that a Windows machine attached to two networks can be a problem, and one of the reasons the RRAS service was created and exists. However, if your computer's NIC isn't getting an IP address during the PXE boot stage and your DHCP server isn't the RIS server, then at this point RIS is not involved yet. If you're getting an IP during PXE but aren't getting a response from the RIS server, then that would mean troubleshooting on the RIS server should be done (including disabling the NIC on the other network).

I'd say it's probably something you should have Microsoft and Intel investigate, as it could very well be a bug in Vista with your processor drivers. Have you gone through the steps to report a bug to Microsoft?

I've noticed an improvement over RC1 on both machines I have running, although disk access times are consistently slow on both machines (no real-time AV either, just Windows Defender running). If I switch to 10K SATA drives (rather than 7.2K IDE), the problem goes away. However, I'm chalking it up to a crappy IDE chipset on my boxes here (ATI), because I don't have this issue on any of my Dell (Intel) test machines at the office. I do have the issue with WMC on every machine until I actually go through the configuration wizard, and then it runs just fine. Hopefully that'll get fixed before RTM (it's been reported). As to the event viewer, you can do a few things to make it more useful if you have an unstable machine - first, make sure your machine is configured for at least a kernel dump, and second, you may want to create a custom view for the errors you want to see, like an eventlog/6008 or savedump/1001.

Have you tried the instructions in this KB article? 840635: Cannot install a Bluetooth device after you install Windows XP Service Pack 2 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/840635

Hate when that happens .

Fax services are built-in, and you'll find them in Add/Remove Windows Components.

I can say that most of the issues I had with RC1 are resolved in RC2 thus far, as printing seems more reliable and network speeds seem on par with an identical XP machine finally (Vista was always slower in previous builds). As to everyone's questions, I dunno for certain about public release, but x86 was released to TAP customers today, with x64 being finished and available sometime this evening or tomorrow (or so I heard) to TAP. If you know the name of the .iso you should have no time finding it on the 'net by now, either from Microsoft's site or elsewhere. Beta2 keys worked in RC1, and since the algorithms to generate Vista keys on the activation servers are likely not changing until sometime after RC2 and before RTM, RC1 keys are most likely going to also work in RC2.

I would try the following things, in this order - unfortunately it involves basically starting over, but bear with me: 1. Uninstall ANY antivirus software on this machine, as well as any backup software agents (like the Veritas BE client agent). Once uninstalled, restart the server completely. 2. Go into your RIS directory, and delete all images under the \image subfolder for your language. 3. Defragment the volume that contains your RIS folder. 4. Make certain the Single Instance Storage (SIS) service is running. 5. Run risetup, and create a new flat-file image. 6. Use the new RIS flat source to build your master workstation, installing all software and configuring your install of XP as necessary. 7. Use riprep to copy your image back up to the RIS server. 8. Reboot your master workstation and attempt to image the machine from the new riprep image copied up to the RIS server in step 7. If things fail during or after these steps, let us know. If it works, let us know as well.

Are you absolutely positive your $OEM$ folder is located OUTSIDE of the i386 folder? They should be side by side for RIS installs. Also, the suggestions offered by Ctrl-X in a previous post are almost all quite correct, with one exception - I would not suggest removal of the LegacyNic option, as it causes RIS problems if you choose to run riprep: 887937: You receive the error message "The network location cannot be reached" when you upload a Windows XP Riprep image to a RIS server http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?...Ben-us%3B887937

Not a problem - I was about to post that thread to you, as it's a fairly common problem, but you've already found it .

If you uninstall the Novell client (and any other Novell related software) and sysprep again, do you get the same behavior? It sounds like the WMRUNDLL.EXE binary could be the root cause, but note that buffer overflow errors when viewing filemon logs are fairly common. It's actually the fact that the csrss.exe binary showing up before wmrundll.exe leads me to believe that it's likely the Novell client binary is attempting to use the Workstation or Server service, which run inside svchost.exe, to make an outbound or inbound connection somewhere (possibly the DHCP connection is being hijacked or monitored), and it's failing after sysprep.

I am well aware that all VLK keys end in 23xxx. However, since his machine was a Dell I made the assumption that it was possible that he would have an OEM version of XP installed. An OEM key ending in 23xxx is at the least very suspect (in fact, I know of no OEM vendor keys ending in 23xxx, but I don't have access to the database, so...), but at the time of the original post I was not completely sure from the last 5 digits that the key to his install was blacklisted. I am well aware that a lot of companies reimage or reinstall OEM hardware with OEM installations of XP with a VLK install before giving to employees, so at the time of the original post we did not know for certain who installed the OS on the Dell machine originally, and thus if it was legit or not. Since it now appears that the possibility of his company's corporate VLK being used for the installation originally is highly impossible, then an OEM machine with an XP PID ending in 23xxx is at least suspect (and of course subsequent posts have proved that this was indeed a blacklisted key used to install the OS on his machine).It's probably the long way around, but I wanted to make no assumptions about the key used to activate Windows on this machine until told for certain the key was a leaked key, so I treated it is a possible legit VLK install on an OEM machine, but also a possible non-legit VLK install on an OEM machine (with of course the latter being correct). It may work, but generally this is not considered a "supported" way to change the key and was never a testing scenario for sysprep. It might work, but I'm guessing it will fail due to the install being a VLK install and the key being a vendor OEM key.

Actually, the parent never pasted the last 5 digits, so we can't be sure it's a devil's own or keygen'ed key, but it is possible. What's also important to note is that it is the last 5 digits of the PID that are the important part of the PID, not really anything before, for most installed PIDs. If your key has generated a PID where the last 5 digits are 23xxx (with xxx being any numerical values), it becomes suspect at least that the key used to install XP was not a valid Windows XP product key issued by Microsoft. Not all keys that generate 23xxx PIDs are blacklisted, but all officially blacklisted keys end in 23xxx, so if your PID ends in 23xxx I'd be at least skeptical.

For the video resolution prompts, you will ONLY recieve these if the built-in Windows VGA driver is installed (meaning it didn't pick up any built-in or 3rd party drivers during setup), so you'll have to find a way to integrate your video drivers in a way that actually works because they're not installed properly. As to the Automatic Updates prompt, setting AutomaticUpdates = 1 should turn it on, but if that fails, consider simply importing the proper registry entries into the registry location HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate (and it's subkeys).

If you have a VLK key from your employer, but you have an OEM or retail version of XP installed on your machine, you will not be able to get Windows to activate with the VLK key. You can only get things to work properly if you use a VLK key on a VLK install, an OEM key on an OEM install (and you must differentiate between a PC-vendor OEM version and a "retail" OEM version, they're different), and a retail key on a retail install. However, if Windows is just asking you to reactivate due to the hardware changes, change your key back to the one that came with your computer and call the clearinghouse number in the activation wizard. Microsoft will give you an activation code that you'll then type in, and it'll reactivate with the old key no problem.