Hi all,

I've been getting persistent BSODs lately tagged as PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA. The bugcheck is 0x00000050 (0xbad0b148, 0x00000000, 0x8056c77b, 0x00000000). A DebugWiz log is attached.

I'm suspecting either 1) a faulty driver or 2) a bad DIMM, and I'm hoping some experts here can help pin down the problem.

Relevant background info:

• Mean time between these errors is now around 3 hours
• Failures occur both during use and idle time, though more often while in use
• The system is a fully patched XP SP2 which was freshly installed about two weeks ago
• Spontaneous reboots (not even BSODs) were happening with my previous installation but I chalked it up to accumulated system cruft
• I installed 2 512MB DIMMs several months ago. The brand is reputable but different from the other two 512 DIMMs already in the system. After installing the sticks I noticed no immediate problems
• All other hardware is a few years old (P4 2.6 w/ HT)

The attached DebugWiz log of the latest crash is based on a kernel memory-only dump. If there's any other info that would be useful I'm glad to provide it. It's been several years since I've done serious Windows development so I can't make much sense of the report but I've played around with non-Windows kernel code so I can follow along if you speak slowly ;-).

These reboots are getting pretty irritating and I'd very much appreciate any insights anybody can offer! Thanks in advance.

Cheers, Adam

BAD MEM REF

I would experiment with removing the second brand RAM.

Also try disabling Terminal Services (RDPWD.SYS) under Services:

start Run... services.msc

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=183169

http://www.aumha.org/win5/kbestop.php

If this same error occurred prior to and after a Clean Install of XP I would suspect hardware and or motherboard drivers rather than XP drivers.

Do you have your latest BIOS installed?

Please post more dumps if you get them.

Thanks for the suggestions jephree. Memcheck86 identified a single bitflip that consistently occurred in one of the DIMMs. However removing that DIMM didn't help with the BSODs. A new bugcheck appeared once, BAD_POOL_CALLER that debugwiz pinpointed in vsdatant.sys. So I uninstalled ZoneAlarm 6.5, and all the troubles evaporated, even with the bad DIMM in (though I still ought to get that replaced). Nice to have a working machine again!

Thanks for the update and the thanks! Glad things are working as well!

Were you using ZA free version? Are you going to use a different firewall? Or just the SP2 firewall?

Several days later and I haven't had any more BSODs, even with the faulty DIMM (I'm sure just data loss I haven't noticed yet . I was using ZA Pro 6.5, but now I'm sticking with the SP2 firewall. Since this machine is behind a dedicated linux firewall/NAT the extra features of ZA aren't too critical.