At 05:08 PM 13/04/2006, Lester wrote:

>Sorry to post this here, but I KNOW some of you use winvnc as your tool
>for remote access to sites to monitor and repair them.
>This mornings update of stop-sign anti virus has decided that winvnc and
>its associated programs are malicious and tried to remove them.
>Fortunately I managed to get to sites and disable stop-sign but had it
>been allowed to run I would have lost access :(
>
>Just a warning - I've sent a very 'shitty' eMail to stop-sign support
>but it looks like I will have to change he anti-virus on every site, at
>my pigging expense :(

Last night local time I took the latest Windows updates (I have
auto-update switched off and get a flashing button instead). After
letting it install and rebooting as directed, I found my system was
hosed. All attempts to boot normally resulted in a a non-terminating
loop consisting of a BSOD, message 0x0000007F (0x00000008, etc,,
etc.) and the message UNEXPECTED_KERNEL_MODE_TRAP, followed by a
core-dump, followed by a shutdown and restart.

MSN was dead helpful - this problem was usually caused by defective
memory, if not, then some other hardware failure. Recommended action
was to try other memory and it that didn't cure it, replace the
motherboard. Yeh, right.

Between then and bedtime I scoured the net via my laptop and come up
with some list mail that sort-of pointed to possible
causes. Apparently one of the hotfixes fixes some vulnerability in
graphics. I was able to boot up in safe mode; I found that the
video driver had actually disappeared. Right, so I reinstalled that
from the motherboard driver CD and was able to get *just* past the
login screen in normal mode, before a repeat.

So I went to bed and left memtest running (I've got 3Gb of dual
channel, so it wasn't getting through the "thorough" test cycle very
fast). Got up this morning, no memory faults.

Then I thought to take a cruise through the event log, mainly to find
out the numbers of the hotfixes. And I happened to notice that the
problem occurred each time as it tried to load the LT Winmodem
driver. I only use the modem for faxing so - worth a try - I
disabled the modem. Problem gone.

Back onto Google with some new keywords. And I find that one of
those hotfixes *replaces* the generic LT modem driver with a beta one
from Agere, which has bugs. Why, I have no idea (nor had the guru
chap who posted the report). Just one more to add to Windows
Annoyances, I suppose.

So - with today's hotfixes - be ready if you have an enabled LT modem
and/or your video card has the NVidia TNT2 chipset. Me, I'm going
to look around for a reasonable hardware modem/fax card.

Helen