SP4 - Cause, not cure?

[weogarth]

Was helping out a friend and put SP4 on her machine this past week and now she's getting a BSOD with:

stop (ox0000000a) (0x00000016, 0x00000003, 0x00000000, 0x80432B2D address 80432B2D, Date Stamp 3ee6c002 - ntoskrnl.exe beginning dump of physical memory

I had had issues with SP4 causing a problem before and this time had a radical idea to try. What if I were to uninstall ALL the updates available in Add/Remove Programs and/or in the uninstall folders of C:\WINNT (rebooting as needed) and then installing SP4 essentially first, rescanning for Windows Updates needed and installing those. Would this have any potential benefit?

Gary

 

[DrGrafix]

Gary...

As someone who is experiencing the same pain... I can tell you that I tried that route, uninstalled (properly mind you) all the MS hotfixes that were listed in my Add/Delete Programs page, and also tried unplugging my network, tried downloading the network install and installing it, and even tried installing SP4 from safe mode. Nothing worked.

My machine seems fine in the Administrator ID, but if I logoff and logon as User... IE6 won't respond, OE takes about 10 minutes to respond, and yet all my other apps work fine, and Netscape's browser works fine. This is on a Dual-AMD machine that has been rock-solid from day #1, and no new hardware installed in the past year, a couple of apps in that time, but they all work great. Go figure.

Someone told me that SP4 is one of most finicky pieces of code to come out of MS in a long time. Do a search on Google and you'll see hundreds of hits... if not thousands.

I'm hoping someone will come along and help us both out. You can read my post for more info.

Doc

 

[PatrickDickey]

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=165863

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;216206

It could be hardware, or software related. And, as for SP4 being finicky, I'm one of those who hasn't ran into any problems with it..

Did you try the "Last Known Good Configuration"? or SafeMode to see if the problems persist in there? If they don't, then it's a process that is being loaded or a driver that's being loaded in "Normal Mode".
You could also try Enable Boot Logging. to see what you get there. The file is called ntbtlog.txt and will be in your windows folder.
Patrick.

 

[John Lewis]

SP4 is really one of the better service packs as far as being stable. Not nearly as many people have had problems with it as prior service packs (or XP SP1), but when there are problems they are really bad.

There were some security issues addressed by SP4, there used to be a general document for addressing these but I can't find it today for the life of me. Seems MS is playing with the KB of late, or I just can't remember the right keywords. At any rate

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;254631

addresses a related issue. Although not specifically the symptoms you are reporting, I believe the suggested fix might help.

I have also run into a problem with SP4 that I have not been able to find a good solution for. Although not related to yours (I don't think), my fix has been to do a fresh install (repair install did not help me), install SP3 (mostly just so I can roll back to it if I have to), install SP4, then updates from Windows Update one at a time. Installing all updates at once put me back where I was with SP4 before. I'm sure it had to do with registry keys that were not handled properly, but haven't had time to tie it down better than my wild guess.

 

[PatrickDickey]

I would have to agree with you about the doing the updates one at a time (even though I'm guilty of not doing it myself).
When you put the update on, I would stop and reboot your computer regardless of whether it needs to or not. Just to be safe.
I guess in short, Try it.. Uninstall all of the updates, then get SP4 first. If the error comes back, you know it's SP4. If not, then get each critical and reboot after.. See which one causes the problem. Make sure (if it doesn't come with SP4) the first ones you get are the RPC ones (KB823980) so you don't have the blaster worm affecting your tests.
If that doesn't work then I would do SP3 first, then I would get the other criticals (aside from SP4). Finally, I would get SP4. IF the error comes back, start again, and get SP3 then SP4 and see if the error comes.. If not, then it's one of the criticals that you updated earlier.

Patrick.

 

[fabraldr]

I had a few problems with SP4 last few weeks and discovered it was my video driver for my Geforce4 MX card that was cauing the errors. For some reason it didn't like the drivers that came with the card so i uninstalled it and downloaded the one on the MS update site bingo problem solved. PatrickDickey gave a good point about rebooting after each patch just to be on the safe side. I always run into problems when installed all the pacthes in one go. hopefully MS will sort out some of this soon.

 

[weogarth]

Thanks to all for the input. Unforunately, I won't have a chance to try any of the advice out for another week but I'm soaking it all in.

 

[PatrickDickey]

Funny you should mention the Video Driver.. I lost my comnputer for about 3 days (Stop error when I booted up). I uninstalled my video driver, and installed an ATI Radeon 7000 AGP Card. that didn't fix it. On the third day, I unhooked my external CD burner, and moved it to my other computer (I was backing up the information, and ripping the hard drive out to put in the dead system, so I could back the data up, and reformat). When I booted the dead computer up, one last time to get my Windows CD out, it got past the stop error..

So, you may want to consider removing all of the external drives and components (printers, etc). Then booting up.. Just to see if one of those is causing the problem.
Patrick.

 

[DrGrafix]

Well, I managed to remove SP4 and my machine is sort of back to normal, but I screwed up my email a bit, and I can't really use the lower task bar for program icons. My IBM notepad has W2K also, and the SP4 install was easy and it works fine. So go figure.

Although on this machine, I have it on a home network, and I have the user profiles screwed up a bit. In administrator everything seems OK, but in user, it's messed up. I need to find out how to get it all restored to normal, then I want to delete the user profile and swing everything into the administrator profile.

Mike