Windows Vista Vista Ultimate ntdll.dll crash

Hello all, I'm a having a little problem here and could really use your help. So here it goes: since I installed Windows Vista Ultimate on my laptop, ntdll.dll has crashed a couple of times. First, mister ntdll.dll didn't like Winamp and kept on crashing but I solved that by reinstalling Winamp.

But now it's back ! I recently installed World in Conflict and it worked fine but if I patch the game so I can play Soviet Assault, it crashes because of ntdll.dll. I tried reinstalling it, cleaning the registry, defragging the registry, all that kind of stuff. I read some stuff over the internet regarding ntdll.ll issues but nothing seems to work. Is there a chance that it became corrupt for some reason ?

Any suggestions ?

*I'm sorry if my English isn't really that good*

 

oh, and a small update, now RunDLL32.dll has started crashing every once in a while for no apparent reason ..

 

One thing in common between Winamp and the game is audio, so make sure you have a good set of audio drivers. In fact, have you gotten specific Vista drivers for your hardware? Does the laptop manufacturer supply Vista drivers? If not, you could identify the model of the components and find drivers at the individual controller manufacturer's website (for example, the audio may be Realtek, Soundmax or one of the other audio controller manufacturers).

Do you get a blue screen? If so, search this forum for threads with "blue screen" or "BSOD" and follow the instructions for how to read the dumps.

Those files are Windows system files. There are not many avenues for "fixing" them. There are some general suggestions here:
http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000961.htm

If you decide to reinstall (or "repair ") Windows, have an updated set of drivers ready to install straight afterwards. Start with the chipset drivers, then graphics, audio and then others.

Matt

 

Well yeah, I did receive a set of Vista drivers from Acer (they made this laptop) but the audio driver was kinda old so I downloaded a new one ( I can't really remember if from Acer's site or from Realtek). Well I guess I could try and install a new one

Yes, blue screens occurred on 3 occasions with the error BAD_POOL_HEADER but it only happened when I used SopCast (guess you've heard of it, a little program to watch TV over the Internet), and I did some research about this specific error but most of the people talked about bad video drivers. Never really solved that one.

And about the .dll files .. I don't know, some people said I should simply replace them but I'm not convinced that would really solve the problem.

I guess Vista is starting to fall apart for some reason ( I tried to protect it as best as I could, especially that on my old PC I've installed Windows XP 2 years ago and it's running great).

 

The TV streaming will also have an audio factor, but I wouldn't expect there to be much of a relationship to graphics (it should be easy for the graphics to run the streaming).

See if you can find a common factor. Three blue screens is not bad, not great either. What exactly is the error message you get relating to ntdll.dll?

It may not be a case of Vista "falling apart ", just falling over, because there is something not quite right. Do you have plenty of RAM? Plenty of free space on the Vista drive?

If the errors don't always have a related blue screen, go to Event Viewer, double-click any serious errors and you will find more details.

Matt

 

The blue screens aren't related to the ntdll.dll error, the ntdll.dll thing happens when I'm starting or exiting games. Even more confusing, the RunDLL32.dll error stopped all of a sudden.

I've got 2 GB of RAM, about 6 GB free on the Vista drive so I don't think this is the issue here.

I looked around in the event viewer but I didn't see a connection between the errors stated there and the ntdll.dll problem nor the blue screens.

 

That seems low to me. I haven't checked in Vista, but Win XP won't run a defragmentation under 15% free space on the drive. Vista is a lot larger compared to XP and I would be careful to give it plenty of space. It also seems to use pagefile a lot keep the RAM free for running programs. I wouldn't run under 20% free space.

Try changing to "Performance" settings in Power Management before running the games and turning off Aero, any other background programs, etc, and see if it becomes stable.

Try running a defrag. If there is not enough space to run one, you will need to make more.

Matt