Archive for April, 2008

Vista SP1 blue screen resuming from hibernate or suspend

Saturday, April 12th, 2008 by Steve

Since installing service pack 1 on Vista, my shiny new laptop (Thinkpad T61) has a problem coming out of a hibernated or suspended state. When resuming from hibernation or suspend it’ll give me the BAD_POOL_CALLER error (and automatically reboot) roughly 50% of the time. It’s so bad I’ve stopped using hibernate and suspend entirely.

I found a solution on the lenovo forum, apparently the T61’s UPEK fingerprint reader driver 1.9.2.99 can be responsible. I’ve installed version 1.9.2.111 (download directly from UPEK), but I still get blue screens if I hibernate.

Other drivers known to be incompatible with SP1 are listed on Microsoft KB 948343, but I’m pretty sure I’m not running any of them. Any ideas?

Update (16th May 2008): The problem turned out to be Nortel’s Contivity VPN client.  They don’t appear to have released an updated version since SP1 was released.  I no longer have a need for this VPN client, so I simply uninstalled it.  Problem solved!

While I was trying to get to the bottom of this I read many suggestions.  Dodgy memory seems to be a common cause, and this can be checked by booting memcheck and leaving for a few hours.