I was fiddling around a little bit last night with the sound settings, specifically trying to get the mic input to play ball. Didn't change anything serious though, and I don't really see how that could be the cause, but this morning the machine refuses to log in.

It will boot up fine, but on login BSODs pretty much immediately, with the following error report and attached minidump.

The computer has rebooted from a bugcheck. The bugcheck was: 0x1000008e (0xc0000005, 0x08244c8b, 0xbad1362c, 0x00000000). A dump was saved in: C:\WINDOWS\Minidump\Mini082109-03.dmp.

Attached Files

Mini082109-01.zip (54.9 KB, 1 views)

All three of your errors are 0x8E and these are almost always caused by hardware and are especially strong indicators of corrupted memory. Sometimes they can be caused by drivers.

All three report the same problem that a RealTec driver cannot not load due to the Windows XP driver ks.sys preventing it from loading. Now normally OS drivers are too general to be of much help.

However, ks.sys has to do with multimedia tasks. You tried getting your mic to function. Realtec is unable to load. When you pugged that mic in did Windows load its own drivers or did it ask for drivers?

See if you can boot into Safe Mode and then uninstall that mic.