It never occurred to me though looking back now it should have. Today I finally found out what was causing the crash that I was running into several times a day on my main Vista machine at home.
Since I installed Vista on this box I’ve been running into a crash when closing Internet Explorer 7. Right after closing IE I’d get a dialog saying “Internet Explorer has encountered a problem and needs to close.” It would happen almost 75% of the time I’d guess and it was a bit annoying as it would re-launch IE every time if I didn’t cancel it in time. I tried all kinds of things to see if I could narrow it down but never got a clue. I also couldn’t repro it on demand so I never got around to trying to debug to get further clues but never got around to it. It would happen very often through through real use but I just couldn’t figure out the specific thing that triggered the failure.
Today, I got a Vista dialog that popped up soon after I rebooted the machine. It said it had a known solution for a problem I have been encountering and to click the link to get the problem fixed. It led me to this page on Microsoft.com and I read through the KB article and immediately got impressed as this was really talking about the exact problem I’ve been having. This is one of the first times I’ve seen this dialog where it really is actually helping me. A really great experience overall and I’m sure I’ll be seeing plenty more of these dialogs over time and I’ll pay attention to every single one. It’s a vastly better experience than just blindly installing updates and hoping things get fixed only to find most of the time that they didn’t.
The repro for the crash turned out to be incredibly simple. Here’s how the KB article sums it up:
Consider the following scenario. On a Windows Vista-based computer that contains the Microsoft Fingerprint Reader, you use Windows Internet Explorer 7 to visit a Web site. You click a combo box control, such as a drop-down list or a text box that has an attached list. You exit Windows Internet Explorer 7.
All I had to do was use a combo box and it would have repro’d. I would have never imagined it would have been something as basic as that but it sure makes sense now. The patch is to the software that comes with the Microsoft Fingerprint Reader and I’m happy to say it sure seems to be working…
Comments
I’ve got the “blue screen on wakeup from Sleep” problem. Basically, Vista has rendered my laptop useless for being a laptop.
I haven’t hit that yet on any of my laptops but I don’t sleep ever–I hibernate them. Does it still repro when waking from hibernation?
In my experience the blue screen on wakeup is due to network related drivers, e.g. external wireless or EV/DO card. And there are some wireless card manufacturers that were notorious for it on XP as well. Presumably, you’re using a newer laptop and the wireless is builtin to the motherboard, thereby slightly increasing the chances that your driver was written by someone who actually runs tests. Still, if there’s any 3rd party device thing you’re running on your machine, that’s probably the culprit.
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