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.