I think it was a BSOD - full screen.  Wasn't your average message box, anyway.

And when it comes to servers - if you know what you are doing there is no disadvantage to windows. If I consider the uptime for servers in my last, say, 8 years, BSD and windows actually win over linux

I'm in complete agreement.

Since the 2k release, the only time any Winserver I'm responsible for has gone down is when I've shut it down myself for planned maintenance. Or if I rebooted it after a software upgrade that required it. They're very resilient systems.

Same for the BSD servers. There aren't enough superlatives to describe the stability of these boxes.

Can't comment on Linux servers since I only have two test systems (Centos and a Debian-based homemade distro) running. They're purely for self-educational purposes. I have yet to deploy a Linux server in a production environment.

These poor little experimental servers occasionally do some pretty weird things. But that's because me and my cohorts are constantly doing weird things to them.

My coworkers XP box refuses to upgrade to SP2 or SP3. Every time I've tried to fix it (don't worry, I've done EVERYTHING msdn tells me to do and it won't budge) it blue screens on reboot (causing instant cardiac arrest in yours truly).

Sure, that's not everyday run-of-the-mill OMG BSOD WTF?!?! but...

About one year ago or something. Only had two BSODs with this machine, both when running ping calling Google in the background (at the time I had several connection problems due to a faulty thingie outside the house), and one of them involved FARR. I suspect the use of the "Break" key to stop pinging might explain that particular BSOD. The fact that mouser is a lousy programmer doesn't help at all ;)

On my old 9x machine, I got a BSOD every time I inserted a CD-ROM into the drive, and let autorun do its job. So I deactivated the function, and the number of BSODs was dramatically reduced.

That sounds plain weird - a crashing usermode program causing a BSOD? Never had that happen O_o

It's weird, I don't know how either, but it happened. And it has happened before with msvc, though I don't remember if it actually went as far as a bsod last time, but this time it did.
The bsod came 2 seconds or so after the regular segfault msgbox, so there is a small chance it's unrelated, who the heck knows...

The first BSOD I have had on XP in almost 3 years occurred yesterday while applying SP3 to an XP machine running an AMD processor. I was aware of the fix, but had forgotten about it since all of MY MACHINES are intel based. Prior to that, I have had no BSOD's on either XP or Vista (during my two years with vista). Bravo Microsoft!

PatchGuard isn't stupid, but it's a shame that Microsoft doesn't allow some (controlled!) hooks for it. Your BSOD is because of sandboxie, and thus not something to blame Windows for

Hi Folks,

I actually realized, I have a classic BSOD on a system that was sitting for a year and now I am refiring up.  It is sporadic, can happen after some hours of usage.

driver_irql_not_less_or_equal is the most common message and
usbehci.sys was the driver when it just happenned
There may be some variation, but I think that is the usual message.

Turns out this is rather common and I remember when I searched for this I found about 5-10 totally different discussions and ideas, with little solid.  This is on a PowerSpec that had been well-behaved for a couple years before this happened.  I did some searching this AM and all sorts of ideas came up.

So I may do the Windows Update route to SP3, delete/rename the driver and replace (after searching for another copy),  take out the USB backup when not in use, check the driver updates,  add memory if I have it handy (which I think I planned anyway), and do a few other things .. and then format and reinstall XP if nothing works (I may I have a disk, and PowerSpec gives reasonable overview discussion support even if warranty is finito in my experience).  It is a nice little system otherwise. 

Hmm.. if I do a OS (XP) reinstall (which I have done on various systems maybe twice) -- it would be nice to have the procedures in order ahead of time.  Things like saving the Sysinfo and serial#, having a Bart-PE type of disk, give Microsoft a call about verification issues and read the articles about saving that, driver backups, checking ahead for the XP disk (if not, use another ?).  Of course this varies a lot between systems (how they vary with their CDs and their hidden partitions and this and that).  Wonder if we have a thread on that stuff.

Shalom,
Steven