Error: 0x009996bc

[Digeratic]

I started getting this error on my laptop this morning on boot up

Ran hijack this, checked it and it was clean. Ran spybot and several other malware cleaners and they all came up clean. No malicious software in add remove programs or in Program files.

Ran the AV, totally clean.

I booted into safe mode and removed all the 3rd party services and the error disappered. Went through them one by one to see which was one causing the error and it was the Symantec AV. Uninstalled the software and the error went... for about 2 restarts then it started again but this time when the machine shuts down.

No programs are set to start up on boot i.e nothing is ticked in msconfig start up and nothing is in the startup folder.

I'm stuck now as to what it can be. I spent a bit of time siving through search engines with this error and they all talk about malware but following those procedures the machine always comes up clean.

Does anyone have any ideas?

 

[Digeratic]

For the information to anyone else who gets this problem in the future

I haven't fixed it but I found a work around to get rid of the error till i find a solution.

Control Panel / System / Advanced / Performace settings / Data Execution Prevention / Turn on DEP for all programs and services except those I select / tick Generic Host Process for Win32 Services.

 

[one_winger]

If you can afford to run without DEP (DEP breaks some Pre-SP2 software), particularly if you don't have a CPU that supports it in software, do this:

1. Change the attributes of boot.ini so it can be written to.
2. Find where it says /NOEXECUTE and change it to /EXECUTE (not sure if this option is valid, but it does disable noexecute/DEP...)
3. Save, and restart.

DEP will now be disabled. If you run a lot of Pre-SP2 software, and have an anti-virus, it's not as risky as it may sound.

Hope that helps.

Cheers,