2008-06-03

DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL blue screen of death...

Over the past few weeks, my windows machine gave me this blue surprise four or five times:


STOP: 0x000000D1 (DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL) is the error that greeted me, in relation to tcpip.sys, and it happened apparently randomly (I could not assign blame on particular actions or events)

It’s strange that this would happen alter two years using the machine without any such problems. After some research on the net, I found that some people relate this problem to network card drivers, others blame a bad memory chip, while others point to newly installed buggy software.

This is a 2.5 year old Dell Latitude D410, and while hardware failures are always a possibility, I think this machine is not that old to start showing hardware problems.

I upgraded the network drivers and removed some new software I had installed, but the blue screen of death came up again twice after that.

So then I searched a little further and found a Microsoft fix for the problem. They claim in their KB article 906882 that this problem is related to a program tries to connect to a loopback adaptor other than 127.0.0.1. I don’t know if this was the source of the problem in my machine, since I cannot think why would my machine be attempting connections on 127.0.0.2 or other loopback addresses (I guess it could be a virus… but I am fairly certain to have a virus-free system).

Despite this, I went ahead and installed hotfix http://support.microsoft.com/kb/906882. It’s been some 7 days already since then, and the BSOD has not appeared again. It seems this hotfix worked. If the problem comes back, I will report it here.

5 comments:

  1. Unfortunatelly, this problem has reappeared on my system, after about 4 months.

    I will try to re-apply the MS hotfix, because I don't know what else to try.

    One month ago this Windows XP machine tried to upgrade to XP Service Pack 3. It was a disaster, because the SP3 installation script did not check for available harddrive space, and during installation, harddrive space ran out. As a result, SP3 did not complete installation, and I suspect the system is now half-SP2, half-SP3.

    Could the failed SP3 have messed up what the MS hotfix once fixed in this machine? I don't know, but I will apply the hotfix again, just in case.

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  2. Last october 11 I mentioned here that I would re-apply the hotfix. It was impossible. It complained that the files are not compatible. I guess it means that the hotfix is already applied, so the DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL error must have been coming from somewhere else now.

    But the blue screen of death hasn't occured again for a few days already (this is good news; it used to appear once or twice a day). What has changed? The McAfee Desktop Firewall has been removed from the system, and substituted by a new product: "McAfee Host Intrusion Prevention".

    This is the only thing that has changed... I wonder whether it had anything to do with the BSOD going away.

    Should the BSOD return, I will post it here.

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  3. wow this is very usefull im going to try it today, i keep getting this blue screen with the same error, i tryed everything so im going to try this and not give up hope, i called dell and they try some thing where they told me to go to the start menu the go to run, from there, type in msconfig, then go to boot, then choose pci/lock then press ok, then restart and then they say that will work but it didnt,.... so im will try this and see wat happenes,.

    mike.

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  4. Thank you so much! I found this on google and I'm going to try this fix! I have the same laptop and it's been happening to me for the past couple of days.

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  5. Dang it wouldn't let me install the hotfix. Supposedly it's included in SP3. Guess I'll keep trying..... I might try what Mike says.

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