Dustin Software Online (post-beta)

In one of our latest computer cases, we found that a corrupt registry entry was causing the entire system to halt with the infamous blue screen of death (BSOD), and no solution could be found anywhere online…I’m sure all of you Windows users have seen the jaw-dropping, work-losing, and curse-inducing blue screen of death.  It’s not a pretty sight.  Usually it means you’ve lost whatever you’ve been working on and you need to reset your computer.  On earlier versions of Windows BSODs were pretty common, but on Windows XP it means something really is missed up with your computer.  When one of my clients brought in a computer and described that he received the BSOD whenever he logged in, I immediately went to work to find out the cause.

The first thing I, or any other techie would suspect, is malware.  A virus scan proved negative, so after some research I found that a STOP 0×0000005 error is sometimes caused by bad memory.  After popping in my MemTest86 CD I found that one of the memory chips inside the computer was indeed bad, and it looks like the PC problem was just about over.  All the symptoms matched up, so I just rebooted to confirm everything was working fine.  It wasn’t.

The same STOP error came up again, just as it did last time.  “This can’t be happening!” I thought to myself.  “Maybe safe mode would at least allow me to figure out if anything that’s starting at boot-time is causing it to crash…”  So I rebooted the box in safe mode, logged in, and everything seemed fine, until the machine suddenly locked up and gave me the STOP 0×5 error again!  I had already checked the Winlogon Notify entries for malware, and that was all good, and the safe mode parameters were just fine.  I was close to losing faith, until I thought about checking out the profile’s registry.  After all, I could log in as another user, so maybe the there was something wrong with the registry.

Partway through running a scan in REGEDIT, the computer crashed and gave me the BSOD again!  I knew I was getting close, so I rebooted and checked a likely place for errors: HKEY_USERS\(username)\Microsoft\Windows and ran an export to see if everything was readable.  It choked almost immediately!  Because most of Windows Explorer’s settings are stored there, it would make sense why it was crashing in safe mode.  So I went and deleted the entire Windows subkey and did a reboot, and lo and behold!  The computer booted just fine into the profile and everything was working again!  All of explorer’s settings were lost in the process, but hey, it’s better than having a dysfunctional computer, right?

So that ends my computer repair tale; I hope other users suffering from the same problem can find this so they won’t have to go through the 5+ hours I did troubleshooting!