d5000t BSOD in tcpip.sys in Vista Ultimate 64-bit SP2

[mrinfret]

I am getting a blue screen in tcpip.sys, STOP code 0x...7F, 0xfffffa600104ebd8, 0x...08, 0x...8005c031, 0x...6f8.

The system is an HP d5000t, quad core, 64-bit running Vista Ultimate 64-bit, recently upgraded to SP2. (I had previously applied a beta release of SP2, desperately searching for relief from lousy local area network performance. I successfully uninstalled the beta prior to installing SP2.)

BIOS: AMI 5.21 12/17/08

SMBIOS: 2.5

Please accept my apologies if I'm providing too much detail in my initial post. Tradition seems to be post-a-little/ask-a-little/post-a-little-more :-), but I'm hoping I can fend off a lot of distracting Q & A by providing as much as I can offer up front. 

Also of note is the fact that after months of being frustrated by failures of the HPUpdate program, I finally discovered, via an online tip, that a permissions issue was preventing HPUpdate from applying the changes it had determined were eligible. Thus, I ran HPWUcli.exe manually. I was a bit shocked to realize that a BIOS update was being performed. As I recall, the update didn't appear to complete "nicely", though a reboot gave the appearance that everything was OK.

My system continued to run fine. Within the past week, I had installed VMWare Server and enabled bridged networking. I moved an external drive to this nice, kick-ass machine and had my favorite CentOS 5 virtual machine running just fine. However, I had suddenly started experiencing problems with Remote Desktop to this box from a wireless-connected (LAN-based) Vista Ultimate laptop. Symptoms appeared to be network connectivity or firewall-related. So, I temporarily disabled my Windows Firewall. That's when the fun began. :-(

Shortly after disabling the firewall, I got my first BSOD. The Windows event log showed a failure to load drivers AFD, DSC, DfsC, ElbyCDIO, VBoxDrv, VBoxUSBMon.

It hit me that I also had Sun's VirtualBox installed and wondered if there was some conflict there. I set out to uninstall it, only to discover that the Windows Installer can't be accessed in Safe Mode. Brilliant! On a desperate hunch, I disabled my network adapter and rebooted in normal mode. This worked, and I was able to cleanly uninstall VirtualBox. I don't even know now if that was germane to the problem, but it was one less "moving part" to contend with.

I re-enabled the network adapter and rebooted in normal mode, only to experience the BSOD again. It's very repeatable, always in tcpip.sys and always with the same failure codes. I've read suggestions online that it could be a RAM failure or a failed network card. I'm tempted to install a spare gigabit network card and see what happens, but I don't want to end up masking a real problem that will bite me later. Without the network card enabled, the system has remained up for at least 1/2 hour (while I've been entering this). I haven't tried to make it do any real work yet, but I will as soon as I'm done here.

Any ideas or answers? I don't consider a clean install to be a good solution - just a last resort. I have a significant amount of effort invested in the setup of this machine and would really prefer to nail down and fix the root cause of this problem. FWIW, I'm a computer professional, primarily a software developer but with loads of on-hands experience with all Windows desktop versions, Linux, networking, etc. So... if you say "regedit", I won't stain my shorts. :-)

Thanks very much for taking the time to wade through this. I hope you can help!

    Mark

p.s. I originally posted this in the Lockups, Freezes and Hangs section, but thought it might do better here. Sorry for the cross-post, if that's offensive.

[mrinfret]

Here I go, talking to myself again. 

I can't say that the problem is fixed, but I have a working system again. I'm also astonished that what I did has restored my system to a working state.

Following my post (while waiting for guidance) I decided to bite the bullet and install a spare network card - a DLINK DGE-530T gigabit card. I left the original card unplugged (though enabled) and plugged my network cable into this card. After several seconds, my system froze - no BSOD, as before. I rebooted into normal mode and experienced the same thing - total lockup. Retracing my change history, I began to suspect - since networking was clearly involved in the problem - that my recent configuration of bridged networking (for VMWare Server) was somehow at fault. I rebooted again, with network cable disconnected - no problems. I then set the Network Bridge (Mac Bridge Miniport) to Disabled. I plugged in the network cable and - after a bit of tweaking (I assigned a static IP address), the new card configured and came online. I then removed my original card from its bridged configuration, enabled it and disabled the secondary card. The system booted flawlessly and has been performing perfectly since then. What the heck?!?!? What changed that would cause a previously working bridged configuration to actually CRASH the system? While I'm happy to have my primary system back up and running, my confidence in the update process (especially HPUpdate, which I only recently got working - see prior post) is quite shaken.

Mark 

[sandles]

I know practically nothing about computers and I'm not sure if we are talking about the same thing or not.  But this is what has happened to my computer it is all of a sudden a shared network that I can't disable.  I have no reason for a shared network and I don't know what is going on.  You can see in the taskbar two computers with some kind of icon on it....can't see what the icon is it's really small.  If this has nothing to do with your past problem just ignore this I know it sounds really weird.  I don't know how to find   who is on my computer.