[MJM]

hi all, I'm looking for some help with a problem which has been driving me nuts for the last 3 or 4 days.

on my previous windows installation, I found that I could not install or uninstall any software without the OS rebooting part way through, so I thought, it's about time to reinstall anyway, why not !

on reinstalling XP, it turns out that after I've installed one or two programs this starts happening again.

on 2 occassions this has resulted in a blue screen stop and dump message (when I turned off auto-rebooting) which indicated some memory addresses.

I've looked into,

MSI package reinstallation (if someone can help me out on this that'd be great, I could only find info for win9X-win2k)

Viruses - there were 2 possibles, but both turned out not to be resident when using the symantec removal utilities for them.

Hardware - memory and HDD's turned out to be fine according to a couple of different test utils.

chkdsk - turned up no errors

swap file reconstruction - used a utility from tucows to reconstruct the swap file, still no luck, I'll probably try deleting the file outside the OS next and letting it recreate.

removing resident programs & useless startup programs - still happens.

has anyone even heard of this happening before ... I had great difficulty tracking down any information whatsoever.

help me tech support forums ... you're my only hope ... *bzzt*

MJM

(if anyone needs additional info, I'll be happy to post it ... just looking for information/links to possibilities at the moment though).

 

[Hooligan]

I fixed a PC doing exactly the same thing recently. Turned out to be the mainboard. Check the ram is ok and seated properly first though.

 

[MJM]

test results etc ...

16 hours of dos based memory testing on 8/16/32 bit access patterns turned up completely clean, memory doesn't appear to be the issue.

what I'm looking at now specifically is the swapfile.

when running SFC /PURGECACHE the machine instantly reboots before doing anything, when what should happen is the message

- windows file protection sucessfully made the requested change

should pop up in the CMD box, and return you to a CMD prompt.

CHKDSK showed up several unlinked files, but this happens now and again and is not something I'm overly worried about. but unfortunately CHKDSK is not all that great a tool for checking for HDD hardware errors (I hate just saying that it's the HDD at fault without checking ... however likely) does anyone know of a good HDD checking utility ?

will most likely just turn off the swapfile for a bit and see if that helps (plenty of memory).