Suspect blue screen crashes

I'm a Windows XP user. I'm not a newbie, but I'm also not a computer expert I've been experiencing blue screen crashes for more than a month. Suspected my previous Brother MFC 3420C printer which I could not uninstall despite contacting Brother by phone, attempting to download the uninstaller from their website, and following EVERY bit of info I could find on this subject! At startup, I get a Windows startup installer that just WON'T GO away. There is no removal button in my Add/Drop programs for the MFC 3420c, I can't find the file I downloaded and I can't find the unzipped file I downloaded to help me get rid of this thing (my WinZip doesn't work). To compound this maddening problem, I decided yesterday to update to Service Pack 3, thinking this was unrelated to my blue screen problems. Low and behold, when my computer restarted, it did a chkdsk on my file system!! Well, I thought, maybe this will stop my blue screen crashes, as chkdsk proceeded to "fix" errors in my master file, volume bitmap security descriptors. But, I'm still experiencing these crashes!! I had another one about less than two hours ago, and when I tried send the error report to Microsoft, it told me the error report was corrupt and could not be analyzed. Never had that happen before. This is serious. I DON't know where to begin. Can you pleassssse help me? I took snapshots of the chkdsk screens and can submit these in a separate thread if it will help.

 

This probably doesn't belong here in the Driver forum... you'd get better advice and more action if this was moved to the software forum. Uninstall WinZip. It's crapola. It's not free, and it's cumbersome. It has nothing to do with your problems, but just get it out of the way and install TUGzip. 100% free and totally fast and easy to use. You can download it from here http://www.majorgeeks.com/TUGZip_d4670.html Just install with defaults and on the last screen you'll see a Finish button, to the left of it you'll see a Select All button, click the Select All before clicking Finish, then close the Explorer-type window that opens after it. OK- what we need is the exact blue screen error numbers (they look like 0x0000007E) and any messages (like KERNEL_IN_PAGE_FAULT or whatever) and any file names that might be listed (like win32k.sys for example). Provide this info in a future post, and we'll go from there. Look through the Event Viewer under System and post some of the errors and their details....

 

Download the Brother uninstaller again, and save it to a known location (like the desktop). Unzip it with TUGzip by simply right clicking on it, and selecting 'extract to %here will be the name of the file%'. When it's done extracting, you'll have a folder with the unzipped files in it. You can download the Brother uninstaller from here:
http://welcome.solutions.brother.co...c3420c_us&type2=2&os=7&flang=4&dlid=dlf002701
If that doesn't work, run a 3rd party uninstaller (Revo is great and very popular and free http://www.majorgeeks.com/Revo_Uninstaller_d5706.html) to remove your Brother drivers. When it's done, run CCleaner on both your hard drive and the registry (a free download http://www.majorgeeks.com/CCleaner_Slim_No_Toolbar_d4191.html) to clean up any loose ends. Reboot. Oh, and be sure the printer is not plugged in to the PC during all of this. Seems obvious, but some folks don't think of these things so I figured I'd mention it. After the PC has rebooted, click Start, click Run, type cmd and press Enter. A command prompt window will open that looks like a DOS window from days of old. Type sfc /purgecache and press Enter. Let it run, shouldn't take more than a minute or two. Now, put your XP install CD in the CD drive and click Exit when the big blue window opens. Then type sfc /scannow and press Enter. Let this run. If you get a prompt saying to insert your XP disc, just click Retry. If this comes up a lot, and you have a 2nd drive, move the CD to the 2nd drive and click Retry. NOTE: there is a space after the sfc in the commands. When the sfc has finished, type exit and press Enter. Reboot. Hopefully this will help..... keep us posted and please provide the info I asked for above and we'll try to help some more....

Good luck!