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I offer a compute repair service in my local area. Most faults are simple to diagnose - others are a real pain. Yesterday I came up with a situation that I nearly didn’t solve.

The computer itself worked fine - no issues other than a bit slow (most people that I tend to visit do have slow computers). The issue came about as soon as the router was turned on to get internet access. within a couple of seconds of turning the router on the computer restarted.

When I first received the call I assumed that most likely it was a power supply issue, the router was connected via USB and therefore when turned on could be putting a drain on a dodgy supply. This was not the case.

The first thing I did was to untick automatically restart box in the startup and recovery section. Turning on the router again the problem immediately occurered except for this time I got the Blue Screen of Death (BSoD) with an error message pointing to the NDIS.sys file.

I then disabled all start up items from the computer and tried again, same thing - within a few seconds the computer gave the BSoD error.

I thne changed the router to use the standard ethernet cavle  - within moments the same error message. I was at this point thinking that maybe the router was at fault.

Plugged the router into my laptop and bingo - all was working fine so it was not the router.

The computer system being used was an XP machine with service pack 2. All seemed completely normal with the machine until I plugged the router in.

Narrowing the problem down, checking on forums, there was definitely some kind of network issue going on with this machine. Every time I tried a new thing, the computer would give the BSoD error and I would have to wait ages for the machine to reboot back up again. Not too impressive.

At the point of finally giving up and going for afull reformat and restore I decided to uninstall AVG insternet security. Also at the same time I noticed AVG spyware protection was there. I removed both.

This solved the issue - quite how or why the computer didn’t like AVG so much I do not know - I assume perhaps a corrumpetd update or something as resinstalling the software, the computer works great.

If you have a similar issue yourself then I would reccomend that you remove any programs that run with your computer. Bear in mind that  I disabled AVG from the startup - the error still occurred without AVG running. Only a total uninstall solved it.

I would liek to point out that I certainly have nothing against AVG whatsoever. I think its a gret piece of software and I personally use their virus protection on my home machines.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 27th, 2008 at 4:08 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.