Usually when I have a tech problem I can figure it out by narrowing things down but this case is kinda different. Lately I've been trying out many different photo organizing programs and one that caught my eye was ACDSee, everyone raves about it. So I went, got the demo, installed perfectly no hitch but thats where the fun ends. The program itself works flawlessly except for one major issue, I get a BSOD when I try and select images in a certain way. Basically what happens is when the browser window opens up I get a list of all the images of that directory and there are multiple views, some of them include thumbnails. Now what happens is when I hold the left mouse button down and drag either upwards or downwards it crashes and gives me a BSOD with a message that cites: STOP: 0X08E Win32k.sys BF8558E1 @ BF800000 Now the kicker about all this is, doesnt happen on anything other than thumbnails...Will ONLY crash when the view is set to something to display thumbnails. My first thought was maybe it was the program but from what I've found, only one other person had this error and their problem went unanswered on the programs main forums compared to the many who actually use it without an issue. I narrowed it down to something software related it looks like, I uninstalled my ATI drivers and it worked. Installed new Radeon Omega drivers, crashed. Safe mode with either works. I've tried multiple versions of ATI's drivers and a single version of Omega and so far nothing. Now I'm not that geeky so I don't know exactly what this could be but I just wanted to see if any of you guru's out there might know off the top of your head what direction I should be going in since I am lost. I was told the win32k.sys was almost always bad memory or some other hardware issue, so I reseated memory and ran memtest86 to no avail. Tried with just one chip of RAM, nothing. Later tonight I'l be swapping out my video card and memory entirely to see if that is culprit but from what I am seeing it doesn't seem so. Are there any programs out there that can detect driver conflicts or at least tell me whats happening right when it crashes, these kinds of tools might be able to help me pinpoint where my problem is....I've tried this on a few other computers I have and had no troubles as well. I've scanned for viral infections, spyware and all the other goodies using an array of tools ( Norton, Spybot, Ad-aware, Hijackthis, Rootkit revealer, etc) and come up empty. Time for the specs: Windows XP Home SP1 Asus A8V Deluxe Motherboard ( VIA K8T chipset, been told its a POS ) 1GB Muskin Value PC3200 RAM (default timings) AMD 3200 x64 CPU ATI 9800 Pro 128MB video card OCZ 520watt PSU So far my only guesses right now are the follwing: Been told that the VIA chipset and certain ATI video cards have conflicts Possible driver issue but no tools to figure out which could be causing Could be video card itself but doubtful Hopefully someone can help me as this software looks excellent in every other aspect and I do not want to have to go back to using another program I got as it does such a horrible job.
Have a look in your BIOS as to your AGP settings. Are your 8x / 4x options correctly set? Have you selected FastWrite? If so, try reversing the setting.
It's a memory conflict issue you've got and I'd bet the answer lies in a software setting.
Tried a couple things and of course the ones that work are the ones that wont work for me. Disabled Fast writes in BIOS, still BSOD. Dropped memory clock down from 400 to 333mhz in BIOS, still BSOD. Swapped out 9800 pro ATI, with 7000 ATI and no BSOD whatsoever with both Omega and Radeon drivers. It seems to me like that the videocard is the culprit and with its past issues regarding the VIA chipset (You dont know hell until you've used a motherboard with a VIA chipset) that it seems plausible. The funny thing is now it only crashes when I drag upwards, not downwards....can always count on computers to screw with your mind :P One other thing got me thinking, when I've been in safemode, used the other videocard, no drivers ,etc I noticed that the speed at which the drag goes is reduced considerably from that of when I got my 9800 pro video card in. When the 9800 pro is in, it goes almost instant from the bottom to the top and crashes midway through, where as with the other setups its fairly slow. Is there some tweak where I can reduce the drag speed? Scroll speed only seems to work for the scroller on the mouse and not the speed at which I drag and select, maybe by slowing it down it'd prevent it from crashing....any ideas? I'm at the point where I might just go get a new hard drive and video card and format this POS...been a year since my last format and of course being windows its got to be reformatted every so often :P Meh *pops some Ibuprofen*
Your diagnosis may well be right and fits in with my own theory. In that case there would be a memory clash and when the event occurs, the Windows Kernel forces an graceful if inelegant stop.
Of course it could be hardware - like your value RAM. I've been tempted but haven't succumbed. There are potential latency differences between premium and value RAM and who knows what that does to real time activity like graphics cards.
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