Mark Russinovich: The Case of the Random IE and WMP rashes

I have just finished glancing over Mark Russinovich’s latest blog entry, in which he described how he tracked down the cause of, and fix for, crashes affecting Internet Explorer on his Vista x64 gaming system, as well as crashes affecting Windows Media Player.

The diagnostic steps that Mark uses make for fantastic reading for the geeks amongst us – heck, all of his articles make for fantastic reading (especially his “The Case Of” blog entries).

I admit that I am not surprised that nVidia were at fault.  Back in the days of IE5 (and to a lesser extent IE6) video card drivers were notorious for causing problems for Internet Explorer.  It was standard operating procedure, especially for crashes involving kernel32.dll, to recommend updating video drivers and reducing hardware acceleration, and nuking a potentially corrupt IE cache (or, more precisely, a problematic index.dat file).

You can read Mark’s article, “The Case of the Random IE and WMP rashes”, here:
http://blogs.technet.com/markrussinovich/archive/2008/06/02/3065065.aspx