EShearin

I think the problem is likely solved, but it appears it may have been a race condition between McAfee, Malwarebytes, BOINC, and who knows what else that led to the blue screens. All went well through several boots after reinstalling Malwarebytes along with your suggested accommodations in McAfee LiveSafe (the program can only exclude files, so I just did the Malwarebytes driver ones and didn't try for the program or data directories). Feeling adventurous, I added all the services and startups back in and went on a reboot cycle to see if something in that mix would produce the problem again. Right on schedule, it did, so I started pulling things off, figuring that pointed to a startup timing issue (would always occur about 3 minutes after the boot) that led to something tripping over something. BOINC with its possible use of 100% background CPU was the most obvious candidate, but there was an Intel delayed launcher that would start in the same time frame, so I pulled both, cycled boot enough to be sure things were OK, added the Intel launcher back, and cycled several times with no problems. At this moment, I'm not curious enough to add BOINC back to the startup to see if the problem returns--it's easy enough to start it manually after the boot and if I get tired of that, I can always schedule it for several minutes out. The scientist in me doesn't want to take it off a system that can make a useful contribution to various research efforts I value. The who knows what else bit is definitely there since McAfee, Malwarebytes, and BOINC get along perfectly well on another of my Dell desktops that differs mainly in less other software and the generic Intel display adapter. In another career, I used to write and debug real time communications software (PDP-11 days-simpler software), which gave me some appreciation of how tricky timing issues can be--given that I'm not selling this system combination to someone for their production use, I can live with the thought that some things aren't worth solving. Thanks so much, Maurice, for your very helpful suggestions and guidance in getting Malwarebytes back into the system! That was the primary aim and it is a complete success. Ed

I uninstalled the two programs you suggested and will give the Malwarebytes reinstall and adjustments a try. Given that this blue screen always occurred on the boot after the installation, it should be quick to see if the problem has been solved. On a probably unrelated note, I tracked the display restarts (hopefully all of them) to a BOINC program that apparently doesn't always play well with the older Nvidia hardware and removed it from the mix of different science applications that I run under that umbrella. Given the frequency of when I've seen that issue, that fix could be the last word for that. Update to come. Ed

Here you go with the security check. Most of the out of date Adobe things I can toss, obviously, but the full Acrobat I've held onto since they've jacked their pricing up so much with more recent versions and I haven't seen a gain in replacing it until I replace the computer. Ed SecurityCheck.txt

OK, all done with the above without event and still running a minimal system. Nothing unusual in logs. Winver gives: Version 20H2 (OS Build 19042.685)

Results for the system scan: Windows Resource Protection did not find any integrity violations. For the deployment image: Deployment Image Servicing and Management tool Version: 10.0.19041.572 Image Version: 10.0.19041.685 [==========================100.0%==========================] No component store corruption detected. The operation completed successfully. So nothing appears bad on the scans. The one display event (4101) I mentioned in the last post is the only instance in the log since the 2004 update and came with the message: Display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding and has successfully recovered. Ed

Will run the check steps and post in a few minutes. The Nvidia Geforce driver that is installed comes directly from their website and is the latest--460,89 release 12/15/20. The release notes haven't indicated any Windows 10 problems since last summer when 2004 conflicted with much older (3xx.xx series) drivers. Supposedly, that was fixed in August. In checking version numbers for the other McAfee installations, I did observe the first display driver stop and restart that I've seen on this version. That was with two remote sessions going plus a variety of other windows open, whereas the earlier problems were when the computer was unattended (but not unused--I run BOINC routines in the background so the GPU is constantly getting a heavy workout when the console is unused).

All the McAfee files (helper, installation file) were downloaded yesterday from their website, so something was out of date only if that's what they were pushing out. I've compared the version numbers of the three McAfee installations I have and all components are identical (the other two installations were done on 12/20/20 and updated every few hours). The only oddity is that there is an entry in the About info for the McAfee web advisor on my problem computer, but not on the others. I don't use it in any of the browsers on any of the machines, so it's odd that it would show on the problem one alone. The data for that are also different--rather than build, version, and update date among other entries for each component, the web advisor just has "Affld: 105". I would agree that the McAfee on this computer has shown more interference problems than the others, but the why of that might be part of the question. Ed

In answer to your question about another antivirus, until this last upgrade cycle, this system has always had McAfee, which came installed from Dell. I reinstalled McAfee at least once over the years, and also there was an intervention from McAfee support to switch the installation account over to the one I had on several other household computers. All of this was while running Windows 7, which was the original Dell installation in lieu of the optional Windows 8 that I did not want. I upgraded the OS last December to Windows 10 1903 without incident and then to 1909 last spring. The upgrade this month to 2004 didn't go as well with a bug check during the failed installation that the Microsoft feedback indicated is commonly attributed to the antivirus. I then uninstalled both McAfee and Malwarebytes, had an uneventful upgrade to 2004, and put McAfee and Malwarebytes back on. All seemed well until a day later when I noticed that the Nvidia display driver had to be restarted several times, starting interesting 12 hours after I had done a last reboot of the new configuration. After updating the display driver to the latest version several days after the problem appeared, the blue screens started after the second reboot. I rolled back to the 1909 version, ran for several days just using Windows Defender by default, and then after updating the display driver, upgraded to 2004 again. This was uneventful for a couple of days, so I added McAfee in yesterday, which initially resulted in a failed installation (the message indicated that it couldn't start the security service). At the suggestion of the automatic feedback, I reran the McAfee installation with the McAfee Install Helper, which appeared to do some sort of cleanup before making a successful install. That cleanup did create some chronic Schannel errors that I've been getting every since, but which don't seem to be a serious problem, so those can wait for a later date. I then put Malwarebyes on with the resumption of the blue screens after I booted a time or two. Thus, Windows Defender was the default interim antivirus after the rollback and then during this last 2004 burn in period before yesterday. I've run the clean operation, which went very quickly. In case you want the log that was produced, it is attached. Thanks for your suggestions, and I'll wait for your thoughts before trying another installation of Malwarebytes. Ed mbst-clean-results.txt

Here is the zip file generated by MBST. At the point of running it, the system was several reboots past the blue screen and with Malwarebytes removed. Thanks for any insights or suggestions you have. All of this software was playing well together before the 2004 upgrade, so removal and reinstallation of both McAfee LiveSafe and Malwarebytes may have changed things, especially since the McAfee installation had to be redone after not completing before I moved on to the Malwarebytes reinstallation. Ed mbst-grab-results.zip

After upgrading three somewhat different Windows 10 Pro installations to 2004 from 1909 and reinstalling Malwarebytes, I get a blue screen (x7f, p1 = 08 ) on one of the desktops a few minutes after rebooting on every other boot (it is stable following rebooting from the BSOD, but one more boot and lights out). The problem goes away if I take Malwarebytes off, so I'm rather sure it is involved in the crash. For other security software, I also have McAfee LiveSafe on all computers, but the one that crashes has a broader mix of old to new software than the other two, which have been stable following the 2004 upgrade. For a while it looked like an interaction with the Nvidia GeForce driver, which is unique to the problem desktop--before the BSOD started, the Nvidia driver would stop and be automatically restarted several times, and when I upgraded the driver to the latest version (it was one update back), the BSOD started. Prior to this upgrade, the desktop in question had been stable and all hardware diagnostics (Dell) pass currently. Does anyone have thoughts about the interactions that may lead to this BSOD? I'm not interested in installing a clean copy of Windows given that there is too much software for which getting the licensing information would be a real pain, but if I could find a way to get Malwarebytes to run successfully without a huge effort, it would be worthwhile.