dtamonis

Nah, there are so many things installed/customized that clean reinstall would be the last thing I would do. Anyway, problem is now solved, and the reason was Nvidia drivers 61.76. I vaguely remember downgrading the display drivers in hoping to fix the shutdown issue. It was not fixed, but I forgot to roll back to newer drivers. And this bluescreen issue was noticed much later, so I didn't relate it with the driver downgrade. Now I installed 77.72 drivers and everything is fine. The hint came when I was able to call the task manager and see ddhelp not responding, and after reading below links I knew that was it. http://www.ttlg.com/Forums/showthread.php?t=89957 http://www.techsupportforum.com/forums/f6/blue-screen-of-death-starting-halflife-12601.html

Update to KernelEx was 4.5.1 > 4.5.2. So far, I tried uninstalling and installing again 4.5.1, which made no difference. Will look into Destro's suggestion when I'm home. I also looked more closely at the bluescreen messages, and they are always fatal exception 00 in VXD VDD. Video card/driver problems? Uninstalling and reinstalling video drivers did not help, dxdiag tests are OK. Maybe I should try to get another card, but there are no problems on Windows XP on the same machine...

I have this issue now that certain games (Half Life, Collin McRae 2, zDoom) won't start, and the result is always bluescreen. Furthermore, after reboot Windows does not load into GUI until I restore a previous copy of registry with Scanreg. This does not affect other games - for example GlQuake and Quake 2 run without problems. Time interval between the moment when everything was OK, and the moment when I noticed this issue was a couple of months. The only change to the system during this time span that I remember was updating Kernelex. However, uninstalling it did not solve the problem. Any ideas where to start troubleshooting?