237353 - Windows crashes/reboots on Mozilla exit

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(SeaMonkey :: General, defect)

Description

[Mikkel Lauritsen]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040113
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040113

When Mozilla is shut down Windows sometimes reboots abruptly, as if the reset
button on the PC had been pressed. The result is always a corrupted prefs.js
file which appears to have been only half written, and Windows does a file
system check on the next boot.

It puzzles me slightly that it is possible for a program to cause Windows to do
this, but it happens about once every week.

Unfortunately I am unable to provide an explicit way to reproduce this, and
there are no entries in the event log, no crash information or other signs of
problems, so it is hard to investigate further.

What is certain is that the problem only occurs when Mozilla is shut down. I
have never experienced abrupt reboots at other times, and the PC is otherwise
very stable when running Windows as well as Linux.


Reproducible: Sometimes
Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[Frank Wein [:mcsmurf]]

Mozilla normally doesn't trigger this, this sounds like a driver problem. Do you
have the newest drivers for your grpahics card installed?

Comment 2

[WD]

Mozilla can't do this with Win2k, as it doesn't have any Ring 0 code.
-> INVALID

If you are interested in figuring out the problem with your machine, first turn
off the option for automatic reboots in case of a STOP error.  If it is indeed a
spontaneous reboot, then you've got hardware problems.

(In addition to updating your video card drivers, as previously suggested)

Comment 3

[Mikkel Lauritsen]

Well, the fact is that Mozilla does this - indirectly, obviously, but it is the
only program that causes this unfortunate behaviour. Note that the machine does
not BSOD, it just reboots instantaneously.

So Mozilla _can_ do this with W2K, probably by triggering some kind of bug in
another piece of software. The hint about the graphics drivers makes sense; I'll
definitely check whether they are up-to-date.

Comment 4

[Mikkel Lauritsen]

Just continuing the story, in case anybody else encounters the same problem.

I've tried turning off the automated reboot in hope of getting a BSOD instead of
the reboot, and then I've found out that crash dumps are actually generated
after all in \WINNT\Minidump . Since I don't have a debugger available I'm
unable to find out much of what's in them, but they all contain the string
mozilla.exe :-)

Comment 5

[Frank Wein [:mcsmurf]]

There is a online tool from MS, which can analyze these minidumps
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=http://oca.microsoft.com (you
need passport account). Some further options for analyzing these minidumps are
listed under http://www.jsiinc.com/SUBJ/tip4900/rh4981.htm.