[Colt Hero]

Proteva Pentium clone. About 10 years old now, but with upgrades along the way (~300MB RAM, 120GB HD, power supply, video card, internal USB hub, CD writer, etc.)

Machine is fairly static software wise. No downloads or new software installed much at all - except for drivers to support the hardware changes.

Problem is, about once or twice per year, the machine will be working fine but then on the next bootup it will boot to the login dialog OK, and after login, the desktop will come up with icons, but then before the tray icons appear in the lower right corner the machine will go to a blue screen with:

"A FATAL EXCEPTION 00 HAS OCCURRED AT 0028:C023DB7F in VXD VDD(09)+00001803. THE CURRENT APP WILL BE TERMINATED"

It then says I can press any key to terminate the current app, but this just bounces me from a quick view of the desktop back to the same blue screen. Whenever this has happened in the past, I've always resorted to rebuilding the machine - which takes a while and wears on me. A couple times back, I booted up in safe mode, deleting tray programs one by one figuring one of those programs was causing the crash. I was able to avoid a rebuilt that time. The last time the safe mode approach did NOT work and I had to weather another rebuild. Today I just discovered that if I keep hitting the single key, eventually the icons will appear in the tray and the system will load and be stable and usable (at least that's what it looks like).

What the heck is causing this? As I said, this machine is pretty static. It IS used on the Internet a little (it's a seconday machine) via dial-up. I've got Semantic anti-virus (up to date data files) installed and it never finds any viruses up to the point where I get this blue screen. One symptom might be long idle time beforehand??? The machine was sitting idle for about an hour this last time, was shutdown normally, but then went to the blue screen on the next bootup.

MORE INFO:

System info says:

1.) 160 MB RAM
2.) 77% sys resources free
3.) Windows swap file drive C (112774MB free) out of 120GB
4.) Space on C: 112774 MB
5.) Ran Defrag on all drives
6.) Running Scandisk on C: right now...

STILL MORE INFO:

Just ran the System File Checker and it found one system file that needed to be replaced (setup.whatever). Also tried running the fix Explorer tool to check for errors there, but it locked up on me. Registy checker found no problems.

Edited by Colt Hero, 26 January 2008 - 07:11 PM.

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1.Start your computer, press and hold CTRL, and then choose Safe Mode Command Prompt Only from the Windows 98 Startup menu.
2.At the MS-DOS prompt, type cd\windows\command, and then press ENTER. Where windows is the name of the folder in which Windows is installed.

3.At the C: prompt, type scanreg /restore, and then press ENTER.
4.Select the previous registry you want to restore, and then press ENTER.NOTE: A properly working registry has the word "Started" next to the date.

5.When you receive notification that you restored a properly working registry, press ENTER to restart your computer.
Cheers
Peterm

[peterm]

1.Start your computer, press and hold CTRL, and then choose Safe Mode Command Prompt Only from the Windows 98 Startup menu.
2.At the MS-DOS prompt, type cd\windows\command, and then press ENTER. Where windows is the name of the folder in which Windows is installed.

3.At the C: prompt, type scanreg /restore, and then press ENTER.
4.Select the previous registry you want to restore, and then press ENTER.NOTE: A properly working registry has the word "Started" next to the date.

5.When you receive notification that you restored a properly working registry, press ENTER to restart your computer.
Cheers
Peterm

[Colt Hero]

Get this: After failing to completely boot up several times over, today it decided to boot up just fine - without me doing or changing anything! The only thing different was the Virus Scan software started its normally-scheduled scan while the login dialog was on the screen. So I let the virus scan complete on both disks (again, no viruses found), then entered my password to login and it completely booted up without crashing.

WHY?

I then copied the VXD file and directory to a save area. I noticed the dates on these files were November 2007 - the last time I had to rebuild the computer for this same problem - so I'm guessing the files are OK.

I also re-ran System File Checker and this time no files corrupted!

What the heck is going on here? It's like a random crash that cites VXD, but it's not really a VXD problem?

Here's the output from the System File Checker run (checking System, System32, Accessories, and Common Files):

1.) Folders examined: 142
2.) Files examined: 1361
3.) Files added to verification data file: 12
4.) Files removed from verification data file: 8
5.) Files updated in verification data file: 12
6.) Files restored: 0
7.) File changes ignored: 0

* The file used for checking appears to be the default: Default.sfc

What's up #3, #4, and #5? Does this indicate that SFC found new (possibly bogus/destructive) files?