generic host process for win32 has encountered a problem and must close

Hi All,

A colleague's laptop is throwing this error in Windows XP (SP3) -

with the extra detail:

I notice all the other threads relating to this on the forums here suggest or point to the problem being a malware one, and suggest doing a scan. My colleague has been getting the error for a few months, and it seems to only be when the laptop is idle, and he'll come back to it and the problem has occurred then. I have reinstalled Win XP for him (completely re-formatted hard disk and did a clean install) and the problem persists. We have done a malware scan and it came up clean so I'm fairly confident this is not causing the problem. Has anyone else come across this in the past? I gather that this error could be caused by quite a few different things.

Any suggestions gratefully received, thanks.

Kev :cool

 

Sorry, should have added the following:

The network connection usually stops working shortly after receiving the error, and then after that Windows fully locks up and a forced power off is necessary. The behaviour after the error can vary slightly though.