In another posting on this site I outlined how I had needed to move my Win2k box to new hardware after a CPU failed & a new motherboard was required. I have now had the fun of upgrading that same system to Win2K03.
At first, everything looked good, I was putting load on it and running programs & applying drivers & patches. Then looked in on it one afternoon after taking the day off from the box - it had crashed. And then it kept crashing. Each time I logged back in, I was greeted with "0x0000007f (0x00000008, 0x80042000, 0x00000000, 0x00000000)" or variations thereof. After reporting the error, I was then taken to the "Microsoft Windows Error Reporting" site were I was informed that I probably had a bad or wrong HW driver. On a side note, the KB posting linked to on this page points to XP specific tips. Oh well, so much for loading the sound card driver - or so I thought. I uninstalled the driver, rebooted; it crashed again a few hours later.
I quickly scrambled to figure out how to use the Debugging Tools for Windows. After a day of trying to figure out some of the workspace settings I was able to open the 6 mem dumps I had archived. All referenced "BUGCHECK_STR: 0x7f_8". On researching - I found this was not a good thing. Most articles indicated that my memory could be going bad or other hardware could be failing.
This box & all hardware had been stable for over 2 years. The last system crash was summer of 2006 (I found the minidumps & their timestamps). It seemed strange that installing 2003 would suddenly bring potential hardware failures to light. So I kept tinkering. I ran chkdsk and defragged, ran some old performance test tools, nothing showed up.
Then I found an article that indicated I might have low memory and Norton AntiVirus could be causing memory issues. Several dumps showed processes begining with NAVEX15, NAVENG, or NAVAP and many files named with these prefixes reside under "%ProgramFiles%\Common Files\Symantec Shared\VirusDefs\". Since I only have 512MB (I've got another 512MB stick lying around, I'm just too lazy to crack open the case) & a newer OS it made some sense that memory could be a little tighter now. So I made the registry change, and 2 hours later *BOOM*.
Still no dice.
So now I'm looking at the memory dumps again, I noticed in more than one "PROCESS_NAME: STARRY~1.SCR" was listed, and in even in those where it was not, things like NtGdiSetPixel, MiRemovePageByColor, NtGdiFlushUserBatch, NtGdiBitBlt, and EngBitBlt appeared, these sounded graphics oriented. Initially, I thought it could be the video card, but it is an old nVidia card and the OS loaded the driver out-of-box (NVIDIA Vanta/Vanta LT). I started to scratch my head, no, it couldn't be that simple The screensaver??? I started reflecting, it never actually crashed when I was in the console (no screensaver running) and crashed more frequently when I was Remote Desktoped into the system and the console had the screensaver running. This could be it...
I had dropped a really old screensaver on the box, it was smaller in size than most of the out-of-box ones, hopefully it will take less memory when running, and it's kinda pretty. I'm guessing the folks who made After Dark made that screensaver do "Stupid Graphics Tricks" and now Win2003 doesn't support those tricks. So the screensaver has now been tossed, deleted, and kissed goodbye. I'm now using the beziers out-of-box screensaver, no more crashes...
For confirmation, I decided to force the failure. After 24 hours of no crashes, I reinstalled the screensaver and proceeded to interact with the system on a Remote Desktop session while the console ran "Starry Night". After about 15 minutes of performing some file system searches and a little internet surfing - which previously had not been an issue - *BOOM* the box went down.
So it wasn't overheating, it wasn't a bad disk, it wasn't bad RAM; it was just a stupid really old screensaver.