Debugging a 3rd-party driver with pdb and no source

Question

I have a disk image that runs well, and has thousands of hours of run-time with no reported blue screens. I set up a reboot loop and didn't see a blue screen after a few dozen cycles.

I installed a 3rd-party driver for a piece of hardware and now get a blue screen every 3 or 4 boots. It seems to be caused by pool corruption.

I enabled the driver verifier for that driver, and only checked special pool. It will not blue screen any more. After disabling the verifier, I still can't get blue screens. This is the second time I've gone through the process, and it seems repeatable.

It seems like it is setting some sort of flag when it detects the verifier - I know there are reports of manufacturers cheating WHQL this way, although I am hoping there is some other explanation. There isn't anything obvious in the registry, and strings doesn't find anything useful in the binary.

The manufacturer shipped a pdb with private symbols along with the driver. Is there any way I can poke around using the pdb file without actually running the driver and using a kernel debugger? I would also appreciate any other tips for working out issues like this.

Thanks