WPF/WCF application cause blue screen when PC is undocked

Question

I am trying to solve a blue screen problem.

We have a .Net 4.0 WPF PRISM application. One special thing about this application is that it hosts a WCF Service, which we use to communicate with the client (Thinkpad PC, Windows XP).

The steps to recreate the problem are:

• Open the application
• Close the application
• Undock the PC

The blue screen message is something like "check that there is space on your drive".

The above steps "work" every time, have tested on several PC's. Anyone have any idea what could be causing this?

If I run the app from Visual Studio I do not get this error. I only get the error when I run the installed application.

Answer 1

Typical steps to investigate a blue screen source:

1. Open memory dump settings. In Win XP this is in System Properties - Advanced - Startup and Recovery - Settings. Select at least Kernel memory dump. By default, memory dump is saved at %SystemRoot%\MEMORY.DMP. Reboot computer.

2. Reproduce blue screen. Wait while memory dump is completely written. Reboot computer.

3. Zip %SystemRoot%\MEMORY.DMP file and go to this page: http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=analyze. Click Browse and select zipped memory dump file. Click Upload Dump.

4. Result of crush dump analysis are displayed in the WEB browser. The most important information is the name of the driver which caused blue screen.

Having WinDbg, it is possible to open memory.dmp in WinDbg (open crash dump) and type !analyze -v (instead of 3,4).

If this is third-party driver, I think the only thing you can do is to post crash dump analysis (and possibly dump file itself) to the driver vendor.