Windows 10: BSOD - Numerous crashes, suspect BitDefender

Hello all,

I hope you can help me a bit. I'm sort of a power user myself, but I have never understood much in the way of BSOD debugging besides which driver the system says caused it. I have had 13 BSODs since 11 March and I'm not sure what started going wrong. I changed my Anti-Virus to BitDefender Anti-Virus 2016 on 18 March, so that doesn't seem to explain the 3 BSODs before then. What I am most concerned about are the BSODs that have occurred since 29 April. On 26 April I upgraded to BitDefender Internet Security 2016 to get in on their fancy firewall offering. Since then I have had 5 BSODs all related to either NETIO.sys or tcpip.sys. Additionally, their firewall has always seemed buggy and will often freeze and not let me approve any network access attempts until I restart the computer. I also upgraded the driver of my network adapter (Intel Dual-Band Wireless-AC 7260) to try to solve it, but had one more BSOD today. If you can confirm that BitDefender is or is not the problem I would appreciate it. If you can also find the cause of the other 8 BSOD's I will forever be in your debt.

Attachment 78555

:)

 

BSOD - driver_irql_not_less_or_equal (l1c63x64.sys)

Hi,

I have not experienced the BSOD for a while, but it is happening again since yesterday.

What's below is a link to minidump files for most recent 3 errors. Two of the BSODs occurred when I was watching YouTube.

BSOD0601

I uninstalled Bitdefender and purchased Kaspersky. Could this cause a system crash?

Thanks!

 

BSOD in Windows 10 KMODE exception etc.

Bitdefender driver appears to be causing the crash:

BugCheck 1E, {c0000005, 903ac056, 1, 44002c}

Unable to load image \??\C:\Program Files\Bitdefender\Antivirus Free Edition\bdselfpr.sys, Win32 error 0n2

*** WARNING: Unable to verify timestamp for bdselfpr.sys

*** ERROR: Module load completed but symbols could not be loaded for bdselfpr.sys

Probably caused by : bdselfpr.sys ( bdselfpr+c056 )

There appears to be an older version of Bitdefender installed so try uninstalling Bitdefender and see if the BSODs resolve.

Consider using Windows built-in antivirus (Windows Defender) and firewall.

If you want to use Bitdefender you could try the latest version.

 

Update: It may be related to my VPN client. I use SonicWALL's Global VPN client a lot recently to log into the network at work for server/workstation admin tasks. The start date of 11 March does seem to correlate to when I started using the VPN client more.

 

Hi jdgregson,

Welcome to the 10forums.

The problem you experience since Bitdefender is a conflict between the Bitdefender firewall driver & the Malwarebytes Web protection driver, this is a known problem and they are working on it to fix this although it may take some time before there is a new version released.
Before that it was a problem with SonicWall & the network drivers.

I hope that answers your questions *Smile

My temporary solution with Bitdefender & Malwarebytes is to disable the web protection in Malwarebytes, all other possible solutions have had no effect on my system.

 

Thanks for the reply, axe0.

Sounds like we have similar ideas as far a local security. That BitDefender/MBAM conflict is very unfortunate, though not unexpected. There is always a chance security applications will be incompatible. But these two have played really nicely together, until now it seems. Do you have any forum posts or bug tickets you can link to so I can follow this issue? Is there any reason you chose to use the BitDefender web protection over the Malwarebytes web protection? I've always been a diehard Malwarebytes guy myself.

And I just read a few posts online about the VPN client causing BSODs for other people. Any ideas why it would stop being an issue? I know I uninstalled it, cleaned the system of traces, and reinstalled it a while back, but I can't recall what issue I was having when I did that.

And if you don't mind letting me in on the secrets, is there anywhere you could point me so that I can some day have any idea how in the world you got that specific set of problems out of those unhelpful mini dumps?

 

There are many topics at the support forum of Malwarebytes regarding the issue between MBAM and Bitdefender,
BSOD, Crashes, Kernel Debugging - Malwarebytes Forums

I have the same problem which started before I did the upgrade to Windows 10, I had e-mail support with Malwarebytes and have tried various of possible solutions.

• Clean reinstalling Malwarebytes
• Exclude Bitdefender in Malwarebytes and Malwarebytes in Bitdefender,
• Repair install, reinstall & removed Bitdefender, removing Bitdefender was a test asked for to confirm the conflict which is confirmed.
• Reinstalled Bitdefender & Malwarebytes + using a tool that 1 of the staff members from Malwarebytes recommended to others which cleans the temporary files of the system + users + browser stuff

Only disabling the protection works for me.

Why I choose to disable the Malwarebytes protection was just the easiest thing to do, Malwarebytes interface is very easy, with a right-click on the Malwarebytes icon in the taskbar you can disable it.
With Bitdefender you first have to open it, go to the modules, go to the feature and then disable it.
It wasn't my first choice but it was the easiest & so far I've had no crashes.

The SonicWall driver caused a 0x9F, the generic description for this bugcheck is 'A driver is in an inconsistent or invalid power state. Typically occurs during events that involve power state transitions, such as shutting down, or moving into or out of standby or hibernate mode.'
From Troubleshooting Windows STOP Messages

It is pretty easy once you understand the basics, from the basics you can start to learn & understand more easier.
I have to say that I still don't know how to troubleshoot some specific BSOD crashes which don't show the usual things when using some basic things, most of the times the troubleshooting suggestions are just guesses from early experience.

Start with setting up Windbg properly:
WinDBG - Install Configure - Windows 10 Forums

Download some dumps from the forum and see if you can get the same results as the BSOD Analysts of Windows 10 Forums *Smile
Here is a tutorial for some basic stuff which generally speaking is what is used mostly here.
WinDBG - The Basics for Debugging Crash Dumps in Windows 10 - Windows 10 Forums

 

Sounds like it's an issue with the 2016 version more than the 2015 version. I suppose I will need to do the same if I get another crash. How often was it happening for you? For me it's only once every 1-3 days. Not the end of the world, but not tolerable for too long, especially knowing my work could be lost at any moment.

And as for the VPN BSOD issue that actually makes sense. There was a while where my laptop would restart after I closed the lid, but that doesn't happen any more. I guess because I don't close the lid with the VPN client running anymore.

Thanks for the debugging tips! I installed WinDbg and followed along pretty far with the zip file I posted above. The drivers it mentioned, besides NETIO, tcpip, and NTOSKRNL, were MWAC and fwpkclnt. However, I had to stop following when neither of those drivers were in my drivers.txt list. I ran WhoCrashed though, and it said that the culprit was Malwarebytes Web Access Control, which must be the MWAC stuff.

 

The frequency started with 1 in a month, but after a month it increased abnormally to a few per day.

NETIO.sys & tcpip.sys are both network drivers from Windows, if either of them is present I usually suspect a few things
1. USB network adapter, very often are they incompatible or are the drivers just outdated.
2. Security programs, they usually are indirectly blamed because where it goes wrong is that the network drivers use the data they get from the security programs (i.e. updating signatures), however often they are waiting for other data.
3. The network drivers (not the onces of Windows)

Ntoskrnl.exe is the Windows kernel, basically never the cause. If it causes issues the user would have more problems than just BSODs.