So I guess this is my way of letting people know that the sandbox can actually cause the Blue Screen Of Death (BSOD). I do not know why this happens, But I was able to reproduce the situation multiple times. It happens most with the Steam game Left 4 Dead 2. When you run it for the first time, the steam box will pop up telling you it is loading the game. Shortly afterwords avast pops up with a notice saying it is running the “Suspicious program” in the sandbox. After a few seconds of that the system will suddenly flash a nice static rainbow of 8bit colors, Then proceed to blue screen.
The reason I KNOW that avast’s sandbox tool is the cause is because I have been able to reproduce the problem, Fix it, Then reproduce it again Every. Single. Time.
The fix was simple. Deactivate auto sandboxing (set it to ask(with ask, YOU MUST NOT allow it to sandbox L4D2), or turn it off entirely). Regardless, After the sandbox was disabled, I did not get a single bluescreen after many many attempts and tests.
Basically, The sandbox will cause a bluescreen if you allow it to run its test on Steam Based games. DO NOT ALLOW IT TO SANDBOX STEAM OR ITS GAMES!
If you have gotten a random blue screen of death shortly after a program was sandboxed, try disabling the Sandbox feature. Doing so has fixed my blue screen problem entirely with Steam and its related games.
And No, Steam nor any of its installed games were corrupted. I confirmed this.
I even decided to register on this forum to tell it, since the matter is important to me. Have been using Avast for years, and still think it is the best free antivirus protection available. Yet, 7.0.1426 did not fix the sandbox BSOD problem. FastStone Image Viewer 4.6 gets detected as suspicious by static analysis and BSODs my machine if I agree to run it in sandbox. Had to turn sandbox off for now because who knows what else can crash it. v6 had no such problem, and there were no important changes in my system since then.
@sigil, your uploaded package doesn’t contain any minidump file - could you please look at \Windows\Minidump folder if there’s no minidump file? Otherwise we’ll try to simulate this bsod manually. Thanks.
No such folder, sorry. Maybe because my boot and system partitions differ. Neither of them has it anyway. Checked with two file managers set to show hidden and system files and folders. Does not exist.
So you need to enable the dump to be generated into Computer > Properties > Advanced settings > Startup and Restore > Settings (I’m translating Windows commands here…).
That’s great, thank you again for your attention. Blue screen crashes are OS- and driver-dependent by nature, and can manifest themselves on some user machines and not on your lab test suite. Still, since it was not there in v6, chances are it can be pinned down. And even if not, Avast is the best free solution available even without the sandbox. Can just keep it disabled.
