BAD_POOL_HEADER during some games

[Sir G]

Hi,

I have a dual boot with an XP partition which i use for the occasional game. The OS works fine in every way, but with some games it goes to a BSOD within the minute.

I have three games installed at the moment:

1) League of Legens (recent game, updated weakly) => works fine, always, for any length of game.

2) Tony Hawk's Underground (2003) => BSOD within the minute
3) Dungeon Keeper 1 (1997) => BSOD within 3 minutes

Since this only happens during these last two games, i figured it might help to reinstall the display drivers and directx, but that did not help. I've searched google. A lot of people suggest registry cleaning. This did not solve the issue either. I even went as far as a complete format and reinstall, and even with the fresh installation the same thing happens.

Does anyone of you have a clue what the problem might be?
Thanks

 

[ksiemb]

Hi,

I have a dual boot with an XP partition which i use for the occasional game. The OS works fine in every way, but with some games it goes to a BSOD within the minute.

I have three games installed at the moment:

1) League of Legens (recent game, updated weakly) => works fine, always, for any length of game.

2) Tony Hawk's Underground (2003) => BSOD within the minute
3) Dungeon Keeper 1 (1997) => BSOD within 3 minutes

Since this only happens during these last two games, i figured it might help to reinstall the display drivers and directx, but that did not help. I've searched google. A lot of people suggest registry cleaning. This did not solve the issue either. I even went as far as a complete format and reinstall, and even with the fresh installation the same thing happens.

Does anyone of you have a clue what the problem might be?
Thanks

http://discuss.pcmag.com/forums/thread/1004321953.aspx

 

[Sir G]

I do not use roxio, and have no hardware issues. All other operating systems (w7, ubuntu 12.04) work excellent. Xp works perfect too, except when playing those selected games. The thread you mentioned does not show anything applicable to my problem, except that Oskarsandino has the same issue I have. He has not been offered a solution. I have not tried disabling the indexing service. I will give that a shot when I am home.

 

[ksiemb]

I do not use roxio, and have no hardware issues. All other operating systems (w7, ubuntu 12.04) work excellent. Xp works perfect too, except when playing those selected games. The thread you mentioned does not show anything applicable to my problem, except that Oskarsandino has the same issue I have. He has not been offered a solution. I have not tried disabling the indexing service. I will give that a shot when I am home.

Sorrreeee !

 

[Sir G]

Disabling the indexing service did not alleviate the problem

 

[Sir G]

alright; i assumed some driver was faulty, so I simply ran xp's driver verifier on all installed drivers, and nothing showed up. Everything verifies fine. I'm running out of ideas here.. I'll post a minidump soon

 

[ksiemb]

alright; i assumed some driver was faulty, so I simply ran xp's driver verifier on all installed drivers, and nothing showed up. Everything verifies fine. I'm running out of ideas here.. I'll post a minidump soon

If you have done any searches for this error, you have seen that it could be caused by just about anything, drivers (which you have taken care of), disk problems, memory problems(not being allocated properly), other hardware problems. eg, does graphics hardware support those games ?

 

[Sir G]

yes, my hardware is significantly newer than those games, and in w7 it works fine (although slower). While further experimenting with driver verifier and special pools and the minidumps, I came across something that might be the audio driver conflicting with something else. (however it is "clean" on it's own). If I can solve the problem with these findings I will post it. If not, I'll dump my logs and minidumps here.

 

[Sir G]

Solved! for future reference; what ksiemb said is absolutely right. This can be caused by a very wide range of causes. In my case it apparently was a problem with a Sigmatel audio driver. I simply removed it in device manager and let windows automaticly reinstall it. After that I have encountered no more BSODs.

 

[ksiemb]

Solved! for future reference; what ksiemb said is absolutely right. This can be caused by a very wide range of causes. In my case it apparently was a problem with a Sigmatel audio driver. I simply removed it in device manager and let windows automaticly reinstall it. After that I have encountered no more BSODs.

@Sir G: What led you to that particular Driver, device manager error ?

 

[Sir G]

I repeated the scenario a few times, each with different settings of the driver verifier, every time causing the BSOD. The BSODs itself did not mention any driver, however. After that I analyzed the generated minidumps using kd from the debugging tools, and found that about 75% of them showed portcls.sys, which is an audio driver. This led me to believe that the sigmatel drivers were the culprit.

The dumps showed other drivers too, but most of these relied on the base audio drivers (like headset drivers), or are bound to crash when things like this happen (ie the kernel: ntoskrnl), like a chain reaction.