My Own Troubleshooting Story

There is a point to all of this, so bear with me. Sometimes the least obvious tool is the most useful...from my blog:


Its no secret that I have been out of the IT world for several years, and as I push on towards my chemical engineering degree, I am slowly but surely losing my finesse with OS troubleshooting. Well here is my sad little tale.

Over the last couple of months or so, I have been plagued with random rundll32.exe errors. It shuts down when I install apps, when I surf the web, when I sleep my laptop...just about any time it feels like it.

Event Viewer showed nothing helpful.

http://byfiles.storage.msn.com/y1pCzAa0haGdwEBvKOLI6hpuwNAb9o3T34vTFl24zxVULkwEvyj8lIcjrcfBrtxFnKPsrxGTF3iWqY?PARTNER=WRITER

Obviously, user32.exe is not the cause here. This was a cause of great frustration for me, because, I have no malware infections, no virus infections. I have very little in the ways of startup applications, other than my touchpad and Intel drivers, along with ObjectDock.

So I had a thought. If it keeps happening throughout the day, its something that is restarting itself. A driver, maybe? Task Manager was no help, whatsoever.

I have sysinternals' tools mapped to a drive on my computer. A great idea for you troubleshooters, by the way.
http://byfiles.storage.msn.com/y1pWuuvQKDvDGPht6zQDI0r7Ws5LODRpmZpa344Hc_D3_eWcmTksM--dcE2puWzpDoy-A1LE92L6I4?PARTNER=WRITERhttp://byfiles.storage.msn.com/y1pYiutFRRbdgAOVFNjMX0vupz7i9qTvkzFnQ4u05HblDEl6ltpiXXChGamlg72MEhir4w1cA_l-hg?PARTNER=WRITER

So I grabbed Process Explorer, and fired it up with Admin rights. Lo and behold, I found this:
http://byfiles.storage.msn.com/y1pXJTkTqKjN-gg3h5mK13jI2T3TI116F6aWJEhtB8EwwGyYjxBMhNdBEYhIpIM-5Nr0Y10mwxFeeI?PARTNER=WRITER

Bingo! Laptops have hell with finding drivers, so I headed over to http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/ and grabbed the latest Nvidia drivers with a hacked inf file. Installed them, and its been smooth sailing ever since.

Moral of this story...if you run into a similar issue, give Process Explorer a try and see where it gets ya.

 

Nice. :-D This is a great short 'guide' for troubleshooting. Should help some of the less experienced troubleshooters out there (and it reminded me to use Process Explorer a little more often ).

Thanks Adryn!