Dell Laptop BSOD / Bluescreen / Crash with AV

[dougyt]

I have a Dell Inspiron 15 Laptop (Vista SP2 with current updates) that started to bluescreen frequently on reboot and intermittently at other times.  It probably started 5 or 6 weeks ago.  It was bootable and stable in Safe Mode.  After a lot of messing around, I finally got it up and running it by uninstalling McAfee and installing a freeware AV and sent it off to college with my daughter.  She was home this past weekend and I attempted to re-install McAfee (thinking that maybe it had a bad version/update) but it bluescreened as soon as it came up after the install....I reluctantly uninstalled McAfee, reinstalled the freeware version, and sent it back to school.  From browsing around the Internet, this kind of problem doesn't seem to be uncommon, but as far as I could tell, it certainly doesn't seem to widespread either.  I don't have the errors written down, but I think the BSOD had 0xC000007E and maybe occasionally 0xC000008E.  Looking for ideas on how to best troubleshoot/isolate the problem the next time I get a chance to work on it and get McAfee back on the laptop.  Thanks for your ideas.

[Hayton]

A BSOD can be caused by a number of things - hardware, faulty memory, wrong driver versions, conflicts with antivirus software. UIninstalling McAfee stops the crashes, but there may still be other problems in the background. Really, you need someone to do a proper inspection of the system and test all the possibilities. First place to start though is with a program which will analyse the files created when you get the Stop error, and Nirsoft do one that is helpful.

For info on this program and links to threads on Microsoft forums, see this post in another thread where someone else got a 0x7e BSOD. I gave links to four 0x7e threads (for Win7 and Vista, all of them relevant) which contain a lot of useful suggestions.

[Peacekeeper]

Also does it use an atheros wireless/network driver? If so update it.

[dougyt · Accepted solution]

Turns out it was a rootkit virus.  Ran TDSKILLER.EXE on it and all the funk went away.

[Peacekeeper]

Thanks for the update