I can definitely understand your frustration. With a faulty mainboard, all kind of errors can occur, most of which don't always appear to make a great deal of sense. The standard troubleshooting methods may not seem to apply, especially if the board is damaged in some way, such as having a bad capacitor, IDE Controller, or a short in the wiring.
In a situation like that, replacing the board may be the only real option. And that <i>is</i> about as bad as it gets. You have my real sympathies towards your previous difficulties. I know exactly how that feels, unfortunately.
The reason for my response to you (and the way it was worded):
First off, I found it unlikely that the problem that gaviota was/is having with Windows Media Player was due to his BIOS settings. I thought disabling his L1 and L2 cache and flashing the BIOS was overkill, and might lead him away from the real source of the problem, which was more likely to be a corrupted or missing file, a damaged codec, other software that was interfering with the playback, or a driver conflict of some kind. In fact, instead of helping him eliminate the error, this advice could have ended up causing even more problems than originally existed in the first place!
Your post also led me to believe that each time you had seen this error, you got creative with the BIOS settings, ... found that nothing really helped, and popped in a new mainboard, thinking that this was the only real solution if an error like this appeared. And that this had happened on several occasions in the past. I found this kind of alarming, and didn't want gaviota to think that each time he saw an error of this nature, the only way to fix it was with a new board. That could get expensive.
The basic explanation for an "IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL" error is, (according to Micro$oft):
<font color=green><i>"Typically due to faulty or incompatible hardware or software. A kernel-mode process or driver attempted to access a memory location to which it did not have permission, or at a kernel Interrupt ReQuest Level (IRQL) that was too high. A kernel-mode process can access only other processes that have an IRQL lower than, or equal to, its own."</i></font color=green>
This is the information that I wanted to convey. You can see that the error can <i>definitely</i> occur due to faulty hardware. But I thought the possibility in this situation of the error being because of damage to the mainboard, and/or one or more of the multimedia controllers was slim, or the error would be occurring at other times, too ... not just during the playback of an MPEG. If there was a problem due to the BIOS settings, again ... the error would occur far more often, such as immediately upon booting the system, or when shutting down.
The fact is ... in some respects, you were completely correct. But only if the mainboard/BIOS was incompatible with the operating system, or if it was damaged in some way. I also think you had the best of intentions when answering the post, but perhaps you didn't necessarily consider that the issue could be due to a lesser problem that might not require total hardware replacement. Despite your unhappy personal experience.
<i>That</i> was the aspect of the post I found it important to dispute.
I tend to work "small", and then start advising people to yank out the hardware and replace it when all other options are exhausted.
And now that we have both explained ourselves, perhaps gaviota might post some extra information about his problem, such as the parameters of the error message!
See ya!
Toejam31
<font color=red>First Rig:</font color=red> <A HREF="http://www.anandtech.com/mysystemrig.html?rigid=17935" target="_new"><font color=green>Toejam31's Devastating Dalek Destroyer</font color=green></A>
<font color=red>Second Rig:</font color=red> <A HREF="http://www.anandtech.com/mysystemrig.html?rigid=15942" target="_new"><font color=green>Toey's Dynamite DDR Duron</font color=green></A>
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<font color=purple>"Some push the envelope. Some just lick it. And some can't find the flap."</font color=purple>
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