Windows XP Crash

Have you looked at your Event Viewer logs? it may have some clues to what may be the cause.

To have a look: Go to Control Panel, Administrative Tools, and Event Viewer; and see whats on system and application logs.

could this possibly be it?

Installation Failure: Windows failed to install the following update with error 0x80070003: Security Update for Windows XP x64 Edition (KB977914).

For more information, see Help and Support Center at {LINK}

..
The machine-default permission settings do not grant Local Activation permission for the COM Server application with CLSID
{555F3418-D99E-4E51-800A-6E89CFD8B1D7}
to the user NT AUTHORITY\LOCAL SERVICE SID (S-1-5-19). This security permission can be modified using the Component Services administrative tool.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at {LINK}

but that only showed up once than i registered my thing ,


i also see a shitload of stuff like this ....


The performance counter name string value in the registry is incorrectly formatted. The bogus string is 1848, the bogus index value is the first DWORD in Data section while the last valid index values are the second and third DWORD in Data section.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at {LINK}



A provider, CmdTriggerConsumer, has been registered in the WMI namespace, Root\cimv2, to use the LocalSystem account. This account is privileged and the provider may cause a security violation if it does not correctly impersonate user requests.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at {LINK}

This update (KB977914) is related to:

This security update resolves a privately reported vulnerability in Microsoft DirectShow. The vulnerability could allow remote code execution if a user opened a specially crafted AVI file. An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could take complete control of an affected system. An attacker could then install programs; view, change, or delete data; or create new accounts with full user rights. Users whose accounts are configured to have fewer user rights on the system could be less impacted than users who operate with administrative user rights.

And it is listed as critical.

However, as you've started having stability issues since windows udpate tried to install it; i will advise you to roll back your system to previous stable restore point.

You can restore to a previous restore point by going to Start, Programs, Accessories, System Tools, and System Restore.