Windows 7 64-bit: Numerous crashes, centered around SysWOW64\ntdll.dll. *solved*

[Jeff7]

I got a nice new PC at work. Awesome processor, SSD, FireGL videocard, and Win7 Pro 64-bit.
And it's almost as usable as the 6-year-old PC it's replacing.:\ Lots of the programs I need to use will crash when run.

Opening Help in Excel causes a crash.
Foxit Reader crashes.
Pro/Engineer Wildfire 4.0 M010.
GC-Prevue.
Outlook. (Occasionally)
The C compiler (for programming PIC chips) crashes sometimes.
MPLAB (Occasionally)

Pro/E won't even load. Windows pops up a box stating that the program has stopped working, and it has to close.
Some of the other programs will work fine for a bit, or under certain circumstances. For example, if the Start Page was enabled in Foxit, it would crash on startup ("program has stopped working" error), but if I double-clicked a PDF and Foxit opened that way, it was fine.
Excel worked fine, but the EXE that manages the Help window crashed on start - "program has stopped working" again.

In short, all but a few programs I rely on will not run on this system.
Event Viewer reports the same thing, that the crash is centered around the ntdll.dll file within the Windows\SysWOW64 directory.


Work system:
Intel i7-960
8GB RAM
Asus P6X58-E motherboard
Crucial m4 128GB SSD
FireGL V8650 2GB videocard, running latest drivers from ATI's site.
Win7 Pro SP1 64-bit


Home system:
Intel i5-750
4GB RAM
Gigabyte P55A-UD3 motherboard
Intel X25-M 80GB SSD
Radeon HD 5850 videocard
Win7 Pro SP1 64-bit


I've got an old Student Edition of Pro/Engineer at home, Wildfire 3.0.
It works fine.
The move to Win7 at home was exceedingly smooth, with very few crashes or issues. The move to Win7 at work is proceeding quite a bit less-smoothly.

Searches elsewhere have thus far turned up little in the way of useful responses. Most of them seem to be centered around a specific application crashing due to ntdll.dll, but not everything.

What I've found out thus far is that the SysWOW64 folder appears to contain files used for helping 32-bit applications run within the 64-bit environment, or in the case of ntdll.dll, causing them to die at a very young age.


Has anyone here encountered anything like this?
I'll be able to get the exact wording from the Event Viewer reports tomorrow, though they weren't terribly detailed.




(And I might as well wave to the IT department while I'm here...this thread will probably show up as a top match on Google for this problem now. )

 

[Jodell88]

reinstall?

 

[Bubbaleone]

Did you migrate all the programs from the old PC to the new PC, and Win7 Pro 64-bit? If so, I'd suggest double-checking the inheritance permissions on those programs. They may not have sufficient permission to access required resources.

 

[Jeff7]

reinstall?

That's what it's looking like might have to be tried next. :\

Did you migrate all the programs from the old PC to the new PC, and Win7 Pro 64-bit? If so, I'd suggest double-checking the inheritance permissions on those programs. They may not have sufficient permission to access required resources.

This was a clean install.
"Moving" programs to the new PC consisted of reinstalling them onto it.
The account is also administrative level.
I can double-check the permissions though.

 

[Jeff7]

Update, with cautious optimism:
Something I saw brought me to this entry at Microsoft's site.
(Reposted below, in case that link's target changes in the future.)

Along with that, I also changed the CPU multiplier to its proper 24x (Auto-set) setting. It had been at 21x before. However, I doubt that this would be the problem.

- Pro-E loads enough to tell me that the license server isn't configured properly - ok, that makes sense at this stage.
- GC-Prevue didn't crash.
- MPLAB didn't crash.
- Office Help didn't crash.

We'll see how this goes throughout the day...


Update2: I think that AHCI thing did it. Weird. Usually fiddling with the IDE/AHCI setting in BIOS results in a blue-screen. Apparently if the system still boots, it can still act screwy.

Registry keys:
- HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Msahci
- HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\IastorV
Set the Start value in each to 0.