Support NeoGAF

[goodcow]

THANK YOU ONLINE CRASH ANALYSIS.

*HUGGLE*

Solution found: Contact Creative Technology®, Ltd. to obtain the update

Problem Description

Thank you for submitting an error report. The error was likely caused by Creative Technologies Sound Card.

Problem Resolution

Creative Technologies Sound Card was created by Creative Technology®, Ltd.. Creative Technology®, Ltd. informed Microsoft that they have a solution available for the problem you reported. To learn more about the solution, Creative Technology®, Ltd. recommends that you visit the following website:

Gohttp://us.creative.com/support/kb/article.asp?l=1&sid=6362

Additional Information

* Microsoft did not create, nor does it provide technical support for Creative Technologies Sound Card.
* If you have trouble installing the fix or the problem you reported persists, please contact Creative Technology®, Ltd. and alert them of the problem.

 

[teiresias]

I don't know if I'd consider them referencing you to Creative "Tech Support" a good sign. :lol

 

[Space Age Playboy]

I don't know if I'd consider them referencing you to Creative "Tech Support" a good sign. :lol

LOL

 

[xsarien]

Yeah, sending the error report gets you into Microsoft's secret stash of patches. On occasion, I was having issues with svchost.exe just tanking on shutdown, and being informed of it on reboot. I finally got tired of it, and hit the "send report" button just for the hell of it. Then all of a sudden I got the "Oh, we've got a fix for that" screen.

 

[Afro Thunder]

www.eventid.net is all you need.

 

[CaptainABAB]

Here is a post from someone that works on Windows development talking about crash analysis and how they used it to discover the source of the problem...

http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2005/04/12/407562.aspx

 

[goodcow]

Here is a post from someone that works on Windows development talking about crash analysis and how they used it to discover the source of the problem...

http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2005/04/12/407562.aspx

(I need to add this to the Suggestion Box page.)

You can report bugs or ask for new features via http://register.microsoft.com/mswish/suggestion.asp And yes every single one gets read. Including the death threats.

:lol :lol :lol

 

[goodcow]

Here is a post from someone that works on Windows development talking about crash analysis and how they used it to discover the source of the problem...

http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2005/04/12/407562.aspx

This blog rocks...

http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2005/03/21/399688.aspx

On one of our internal mailing lists, someone was wondering why their expensive four-processor computer appeared to be using only one of its processors. From Task Manager's performance tab, the chart showed that the first processor was doing all the work and the other three processors were sitting idle. Using Task Manager to set each process's processor affinity to use all four processors made the computer run much faster, of course. What happened that messed up all the processor affinities?

At this point, I invoked my psychic powers. Perhaps you can too.

First hint: My psychic powers successfully predicted that Explorer also had its processor affinity set to use only the first processor.

Second hint: Processor affinity is inherited by child processes.

Here was my psychic prediction:

My psychic powers tell me that

1. Explorer has had its thread affinity set to 1 proc....
2. because you previewed an MPG file...
3. whose decoder calls SetProcessAffinityMask in its DLL_PROCESS_ATTACH...
4. because the author of the decoder couldn't fix his multiproc bugs...
5. and therefore set the process thread affinity to 1 to "fix" the bugs.

Although my first psychic prediction was correct, the others were wide of the mark, though they were on the right track and successfully guided further investigation to uncover the culprit.

The real problem was that there was a third party shell extension whose authors presumably weren't able to fix their multi-processor bugs, so they decided to mask them by calling the SetProcessAffinityMask function to lock the current process (Explorer) to a single processor. Woo-hoo, we fixed all our multi-processor bugs at one fell swoop! Let's all go out and celebrate!

Since processor affinity is inherited, this caused every program launched by Explorer to use only one of the four available processors.

(Yes, the vendor of the offending shell extension has been contacted, and they claim that the problem has been fixed in more recent versions of the software.)