Mysterious driver or damaged hardware

[lankysteelman]

I made a major upgrade to my system last week: motherboard, CPU, video card, RAM, and power supply. Short of the case and harddrives - its practically a new system. I started getting erratic behavior in complex applications like photoshop and 3dsmax within a few days. Come to find out anything I save from 3dsmax is corrupt when I try to read it back - it doesn't matter if I save it to a HD, jumpdrive, or network drive - its just garbage. Eventually 3dsmax will crash even if I work on fresh file. Everything was fine before the upgrades.

I can make my system halt and display the blue screen of death on startup if I run verifier to look at my drivers. I narrowed down the driver to afd.sys. If I look at any other driver - my system will start fine but I still get problems in serious applications (games seem run fine) and corrupt files from 3dsmax.

On a related hunch from my verifier journey - I can get my system to startup without a problem if I disable my onboard NIC drivers even with verifier looking for conflicts. I've gone through each device listed in device manager and selected for each to get an updated driver - nothing newer.

Maybe unrelated - but the system will not sleep - the monitors blink off but none of the fans slow down and I can't get it to wake up and I'm end up forcing a reboot. I have gotten two BSOD errors since the upgrade: "Page fault in nonpaged area" and some error about a bad cfn (sorry, I didn't write that one down). Everything I know about machines would say its bad RAM but, Windows Memory Diagnostics and Memtest84+ came back negative. I'm not running any kind of overclocking on the system or graphics card.

New Specs:
600w rosewill powersupply
MSI mainboard 890XFA - GD70 (latest BIOS, MSI build 26)
PhenomII AM3 x6 2800
nvidia GeForce GTX 470 Graphics Card
3x 2GB RAM
Windows 7 64bit


Can I rule out anything else before shipping back the motherboard? Can I provide any other information that would be useful to diagnosing this? I've spent dozens of hours search this and other forums with no success. Please let me know if I've overlooked anything.

 

[Emerald]

You will probably continue to have problems since the old and new drivers are conflicting.

After changing that many components I would advice you reformat the HDD and a fresh install of Windows.

 

[lankysteelman]

Fresh install. Just got the same problem.

 

[lankysteelman]

actually - i rolled back my machine to the fresh install and reran verifier to look for all drivers. and I'm clean.

I'm going to have to install devices one at a time and windows [updates] one at a time and when I get the error - I'll know the culprit.

 

[lankysteelman]

strange happenings continue:

-installed ati system drivers from MSI website, restarted computer.
-bootmgr missing on load
-windows 7 system repair couldn't find windows installed on any of the HDs
-reloaded windows 7
-installed ati system drivers, restarted computer, clean startup
-turned on verifier to watch for all drivers, restarted, clean startup
-installed geforce drivers, restarted verifier, clean startup

Now back to the gameplan of installing devices and windows updates one at a time until i hit the conflict. Anyone think that's crazy? Anyone know of a windows update to avoid? Does my log scream motherboard failure? I'm willing to return components (newegg) but I don't know which to return. The memtest(s) were pretty conclusive that RAM and CPU cache is not the problem. Can I rule out the CPU? PSU? Graphics Card? or MB?

no suggestion will surprise me. i was completely willing to die laughing when a week of testing could have been avoided with a simple windows reinstall.

 

[lankysteelman]

I found a culprit: AVG2011.

installed AVG and I get BSOD
uninstall AVG and I get a clean startup
reinstalled AVG and I get BSOD
started in safemode, ran a full scan (in case it was a virus), negative
uninstalled AVG and I get a clean startup again

 

[lankysteelman]

Please help, going crazy:

I installed about 3 different virus scanners - all blue screened with IRQ less than or equal to... Eventually, An Avast trial is running smoothly.

I reinstalled my snazzy 3dsmax2010 but it takes about 15mins to load. I'm totally ready to start returning this junk, but I don't know what's wrong.

:help: