Driver IRQL NOT Less or equal blue screen error

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
1

Hi

I thought I had posted about this before but could not find the previous post. Maybe not.

When I first installed Avast! I had this problem.

I haven’t had it for a while so I figured things were ok.

A few days ago, and twice today the same thing happened.

My screen turns blue and says windows has encountered a problem and will shut down.

driver_irql_not_less_or_equal

It says it has something to do with newly installed software or hardware.

I have to push the button on the front of the cpu to shut down.

What is causing this?

Thanks

2

Isn’t there a name of the faulty driver causing this?
If you see Windows Events, will them tell anything about this error?
Do you have any other antivirus or security program that could conflict with avast?

3

Hi

As far as I could tell no name just what I wrote down. Then there was the normal text about shutting down, safe mode, dumping something.

I am running winxp home, avast!, kerio

I haven’t installed anything new since I installed avast!

Windows events: I’m not sure what this is. Is it a file I can open that has related info in it?

If it happens again I will write down all the info.

Besides this issue, I have not been having any problems.

Hi again Googled the windows event info and found info on what to do. I am going to go see if I can view it.

4

Hi

Under th event viewer/antivirus

8/29/2006 source: Avast 10:54:06
warning: event 1090
function setiface update package has failed. Return code is 0x20000004, dwRes is 20000004 (I hope thats the correct amount of 0’s, it’s a bit small for me to read)

8/29/2006 source: Avast 10:54:06
an error has occurred while attempting to update. Please check logs.

Now, this morning when I turned on the computer I did get a pop up by the A logo that said something about the update was incomplete. (I’ve updated before with no problems)

These two events are in the a.m. The blue screen happened in mid afternoon.

5

The antivirus log isn’t related to this problem and on a crash/BSOD it would be unlikely it would create an entry in the System section which is more likely to be where any event entry would be. You would need to look at the time stamp to see that it roughly corresponds with the time of your BSOD.

If you do a google search for driver_irql_not_less_or_equal you will find that most of these are memory related and or very difficult to track down. If it is an infrequent occurrence I would simply restart my system and get on, it isn’t worth trying to track down every BSOD unless it is so frequent to make this research worthwhile.

I’ve had that error a few times and it took ages to track down to memory problems, an overclocked cpu that also overclocked RAM and it simply couldn’t cope. When the overclock was backed off a bit no more errors.

You will have to get into the habit of writing down the full BSOD information because that is the only way to narrow down the possible culprit. The driver_irql_not_less_or_equal is a very common BSOD that is used for multiple issues, it also mentioned Driver on mine but as far as I could tell there was no driver involvement.

6

These are avast events…
Windows Events: Start Menu > Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Events
Go to System tab and look for ‘Errors’…

They’re not related each other…