Minidump errors, (betcha cant solve)

[Booyah]

noone replied to last post so ill try again.

4 pc lan, all randomly crash with minidump errors. all freshly formatted with all updates, all drivers current from manufacturers sites, not running hot, no conflicts. no additional software installed. one stick of ram on each, one harddrive each, one cd-rom each.

here is an example of the SERIOUS ERROR technical data:

C:\DOCUME~1\User\LOCALS~1\Temp\WER6514.dir00\Mini020205-03.dmp
C:\DOCUME~1\User\LOCALS~1\Temp\WER6514.dir00\sysdata.xml

it then creates a minidmp folder in my C:\Windows folder and everytime it crashes after that it puts another .dmp file in there.


PC1:
AMD Athlon 64 3000+
Geforce FX 5500 OC
512mb DDR333
80GB WD HDD
Windows XP Home SP2

PC2:
AMD Athlon XP 2100+
Geforce ti 4600
256mb DDR333
40GB Maxtor HDD
Windows XP Pro SP2

PC3:
AMD Athlon XP 1800+
Geforce4 MX440
512mb DDR266
40GB Maxtor HDD
Windows XP Pro SP2

PC4:
AMD Athlon XP 1600+
3D Prophet DDR
512mb PC133
40GB Maxtor HDD
Windows XP Pro SP2

All home-built systems have bios flashed, PC3 is a compaq. All have same error

 

[RangerXero]

Hmmmmmm , turn off the memory dump and debugging features?

Have ya scanned all systems for viruses?

 

[Booyah]

scanned, no viruses on any. no adware either. what i tried was resetting my virtual ram and, so far so good. but i bet you $5 that it will happen again, and when it does ill post. but for now how do i turn off memory dump?

 

[RangerXero]

it was just a thought .. im not sure , but it might help.. it sure wont hurt anything unless your a geek that enjoys sitting around debugging stuff.

 

[Osiris]

What kind of software do you have on all your machines? Do you have the same software on each machine? Does it happen when you use a certain program?

What Is a Minidump?
A minidump is a file containing the most important parts of a crashed application. It is written on the userÂ’s machine and then the customer can submit it to the developer. The developer can load the dump to help determine the cause of the crash and develop a fix.

Since the early days of Windows NT, the Dr. Watson program has been able to generate crash dump files, denoted with the .dmp extension. However, they were not as useful as they should have been because of two problems:

They were huge. The dump of an application included every byte of the entire process space, so a crash in something simple like Notepad would be several megabytes in size, and a crash in something like Word can be many hundreds of megabytes. The files were just too big to send by e-mail or FTP.
Their content was not necessarily useful. Dr. Watson was, in fact, a just-in-time (JIT) debugger, and it is difficult for a debugger to get the full path to a loaded module. Full debuggers such as the Visual Studio debugger complete a number of steps to get the paths, but Dr. Watson did not. This usually resulted in unhelpful module names such as MOD0000 and so on.
Minidumps were designed to fix these problems in a number of ways:

Instead of saving the entire process space, only certain sections are saved. There is no point in saving copies of modules such as Kernel32.dll; if the version number is included, it is easy to get a copy from a Windows CD. The actual memory heap of the application is by default not saved in a minidump; it is not required to debug a surprisingly high percentage of crashes. You can save the heap if you need to, however.
The minidump save code works to get accurate and full information for modules, including their names, paths, version information, and internal timestamps.
The minidump save code also gets the list of threads, their contexts (that is, register sets), and the memory behind their stacks.
The whole file is compressed, further reducing its size. A minidump for Notepad is around 6K on Windows XP, almost 300 times smaller than the previous crash dump of the same process.
Note Kernel-mode minidumps, which are generated by Windows XP after a computer stops responding, also exist, but this article discusses more common user-mode minidumps