For some reason, about a month or so ago, my system started spitting out STOP messages. A reinstall of Windows seemed to have fixed it but it's begun again and I haven't the vaguest idea why.
So, here is what I've done so far. This is a fresh copy of Windows XP, installed last week. Very few modifications. I had originally installed modified user optimized versions of my Nvidia chipset, Nvidia video and Creative driver files, but I have since removed them, run Drive Cleaner proper to get rid of any leftovers and reinstalled the standard ones. This seems to have had no effect.
Defragmentation is minimal to none at this point. I don't have an anti-virus at the moment, but I have a hard time believing that I managed to contract a virus with the Windows Firewall up and no downloading. I will do a full scan later, I simply don't have that much down time to spend six or seven hours scanning my 120 and 80 drives.
I've run Memtest on several occasions, all of them ran overnight with no problems. So that would rule out any faulty memory. I've done malware, adware scans with Adaware and Search and Destroy. Minimal infections, all cleaned, nothing found since. System temperatures for both the GPU and CPU are within the acceptable range.
All updates and fixes have been applied via Windows Update. Pagefile is fixed, set at a decent size. None of this 1.5x your memory crap.
That about covers everything I've tried so far, but I'm probably missing alot. I've been working since 4 pm and it's now 1:15 pm, so I'm extremely tired and very frustrated.
Here my system specifications:
Asus A7N8X Deluxe
AMD Athlon XP 3200+ (Barton core)
1 GB of Corsair, TwinX kit in Dual memory configuration
XFX Geforce 6800 GT 256 MB
Maxtor 120 GB DiamondMax
Maxtor 80 GB DiamondMax
Sound Blaster Audigy
The errors have stopped at least during idle time, but I'm getting them during gaming. Call Of Duty 2 being the worst offender, it enjoys crashing every 5 mins if I try playing that. Just started too. It also pauses and loops the sound for about 5-10 seconds upon load of a game, then resumes. It doesn't crash during video playback or audio playback, such as movies and music, only during games it seems.
The error code is always the same: 0x100008e with a reference to portcls.sys
I've pasted all the dump events to a text file, which I can post here if it's helpful. I got minidumps as well, but I couldn't get anything out of them with the Windows Debugging Tools. References about it trying to open a second IDE channel before it crashes, that's about it.
I haven't had much time to try other games, maybe it's specific to this one, but I don't think so somehow. It was working fine less then a week ago and it starts doing this with no hardware or software changes so I'm puzzled.
Please, please someone help me before I go insane and throw my computer out the window, and kill some poor bystander on the sidewalk below with 50 pounds of falling steel! :(
Thank you in advance, for any help you can provide. :)
