Another Vista problem! Network Shuttle SN25P nForce 4

[dansiviter]

I was wondering if anyone else has had the same problems as me with Vista. After several weeks of playing with vista only to get a multitude of BSoD's and strange hanging I think I've diagnosed the cause but not the actual problem: the network...

Let me explain. On restart vista boots successfully. Once logged into the desktop Vista negotiates onto the network. When it is on the network suddenly it gains a strange stutter to the mouse and any application I'm running. After about 2-3 minutes it will either BSoD or all applications will close displaying just the desktop picture. No amount of Ctrl-Alt-Del-ing will allow the taskmanager to appear and it won't turn off.

However, all of these symptoms seem to evaporate if I pull the plug on the network cable (not disabling the device though!). Now I find this bizzare as the driver is that supplied by in-the-box in the vista release. The only thing I think it can be is once of the windows services using the network when it connects. I have had it working fine before (god knows what I did though) but needed to do a reinstall.

My hardware is:
Shuttle SN25P (latest BIOS update)
AMD 64 3000+
Corsair 2GB XMS Twinx
Maxtor 250GB (can't remember the model, but it's a 16MB cache NCQ SATA II)
XFX gForce 6600 GT 128MB
Belkin ADSL Router

Can anyone shead any light onto the problem?

Annoyingly my brother installed Vista onto his laptop and it's worked perfectly for a month without any drivers being added. Agggghhhh!

[Paul Adams]

x86 or x64 version of Vista?
Build 5384?

Have you installed the nVidia nForce chipset drivers for Vista Beta 2 from June 29th from here:
http://www.nzone.com/object/nzone_do...etadriver.html

[dansiviter]

Sorry it took so long for the reply, I've been away.

I thought I'd put that, it's the x64 build I have on there at the moment. However, I've had similar BSoB problems with the x86 build.

Since I've turned off ip6 from the network it's been working perfectly with the network plugged in. However, today when I get to it is keeps BSoDing. The only thing I did yesterday was install windows mobile for my SPV m600. I think I'm gonna have to uninstall that now!

I have installed as much as my computer will allow of the nVidia drivers. I think everyone who has dared touch them has realised that the installation instructions are not worth the, erm... PDF they're printed to. I've painstakingly gone through every device in the device manager and tried to associate the drivers with them. To no avail except the "NIVDIA nforce PCI System Management".

Does anyone have a simple way to analyse the minidump files windows makes? I'm a C++ and Java developer by trade, so don't know the in and outs of this .net rubbish.

Thanks all!

[Paul Adams]

There isn't really an "easy" way to look at the dumps created by Dr Watson or the BugCheckEx code - you have to know about stacks, threads, heaps, IRPs, memory-mapped files, etc.

Also, the dumps you get are often inconclusive as the problem was memory corruption and the exception (crash) only occurred when the corruption led to something illegal being attempted, which could be much later than the time of the corruption and a completely different process or driver.

The debugger isn't much use without symbols - basically the association of locations in files and the functions they correspond to, but if you are interested in looking into it:
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/devtoo...g/default.mspx

Sometimes you get lucky and it's a straightforward "the driver tried to do something dumb", other times it's a nightmare which turns out to be a hardware issue (CPU bit-flipping registers is always fun to track down).

Set up the debugger, symbols and symbols environment variable and load your dump file - the first commands to enter are:
.reload /f
!analyze -v
It can take a while for these to complete, especially when symbols need to be downloaded for loaded modules (watch your network activity to see how busy it is).