Stop error caused by PCI card

[rightcoast]

Hey all, I figure I can tell you what we have done, and see if anyone has any ideas. The entire shop is stumped including the myself, the Lead Tech and the Project Manager.

We are trying to install a Rocketport 550 card into a PCI slot. After installing the drivers from the site for xp (which are not "XP tested and approved", you know the dialog box) upon a reboot it gives a stop 0x00000050 page_fault_in_a_nonpaged_area error. The card works fine on a different XP machine, identical system components. Ram was swapped out (2x512 DDR2), sticks run individually in each channel, and known good RAM (memtest86 tested) was put through the same procedure. I checked for resource conflicts. I tried every RAM configuration with a 0MB swap, a 512MB swap, a 1024 swap and a 2048 MB swap. Another known good card was put in there as well, and did not function.

I found this KB and requested and applied the hotfix (which looks to be going into SP3). http://support.microsoft.com/kb/888321 Even though it is just a multi-port serial communicator, I thought it may help.

I tried all of the above with and without the hotfix applied. If anyone has any ideas, throw them out. If anyone has any questions if I forgot to touch on something, ask away. I'll check in over the weekend on this even though it is a work issue. Thanks in advance for any help or ideas.

[juppy]

Well, you seem to have pretty much weeded out the bad hardware possibilities, so I'll ask you this. Since you have an identical computer there that DOES work with that card, have you went into the BIOS of each machine and made sure the settings in there are the same as well? Particularly I'm thinking of settings that have to do with memory since that's a memory error you're getting. Make sure those are the same in both systems, especially things like shadowing and caching.

[GaryRouth]

I would imagine you've checked these already, but just in case:

1) Does the driver version match on both the working machine & the troubled one?
2) Have you tried a different PCI slot yet?
3) Have you looked for clues in the Event Viewer?

. . . Gary

[rightcoast]

Juppy, I personally didn't check the bios settings. I was told by the person who did that they were the same. I think I will make sure myself on Monday.

Gary, they were the same driver. I tried two of the three available PCI slots, the one closest to the AGP slot and the one below. Neither one was causing an issue as far as a conflict, and nothing of consequence in the Event Viewer either.

Good ideas so far, thanks. Hopefully it is something simple we are overlooking. I should also say this is the second motherboard as well. We just tried the same model motherboard in there, but no luck with that either. The computers have the same exact image too, XP Pro SP2. We image the desktops as they come in on lease with an image for each model.

[rightcoast]

Well, problem solved. It seems the newest Comtrol driver for XP is buggy. After some looking around I noticed that ALL FIVE machines had a different driver version that was no longer available on the website. I took the driver off a working PC and used that. No more issues.

It's always something simple, I wish I had thought of that on Friday, heh.

[GaryRouth]

Nice detective work: a little ironic that it's a diagnostic tool's driver causing grief. Thanks for letting us know (someone else will undoubtably come across this same error someday - and will thank you for saving them time). Glad you found it.