Former Microsoft Employee offers fix for XP SP3 Reboot Issue

(TheForceField.Net) May 15, 2008 — A former security employee for Microsoft issued a fix for computers plagued by the constant reboot issue caused by Windows XP Service Pack 3 yesterday.  In a series of posts in his blog, Jesper Johanssen, Microsoft Security MVP and former Microsoft employee, discussed the reboot problem and released a script written in Visual Basic to resolve it.

The issue is caused when Windows XP Service Pack 3 is installed on a PC with an AMD processor. It affects certain OEM computers in particular, most notably HP. The problem was first reported the day after the re-release of SP3 to the mainstream and was the cause of much angst among Windows users in a Microsoft TechNet forum, leading to speculation that once again, Microsoft had released another buggy service pack.

In reality, it may actually be the OEM at fault. The problem appears to manifest itself after Service Pack 3 is installed on a computer with an AMD processor and pre-installed with an XP image that was originally created on an Intel based PC. The image installs intelppm.sys, a driver for power management in Intel PCs and amdk8.sys, a power management driver for AMD based computers. Running intelppm.sys on an AMD processor will cause it to reboot constantly. In reality it causes a STOP error 0x0000007e, however if the computer is configured to automatically restart it will endlessly reboot too fast to display the blue screen.  If you set the computer to "disable the automatic restart on system failure" and you see that error code, you have the issue.

You can download the fix from his web site at Jesper's Blog .

 

 

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