I have recently installed Windows XP Professional on my Thinkpad 600x. Everything in the installation went fine, I've installed a small amount of software (Firefox, Photoshop, a couple of audio players, Avast antivirus), and I have dutifully installed all of the updates, including Service Pack 2. Unfortunately, the machine has a tendency to crash during shutdown, which always results in it coming back up and telling me it has "recovered from a serious error". After submitting the reports, it suggests that the problem is due to a missing driver - Crystal SF (WDM) Audio Driver. However, it always fails when I try to install this, resulting in the whole sad story starting all over again. I have followed the instructions on the Windows driver help page, most of which involved renaming the catroot2 file, but this did me no good. It's also worth noting that, in addition to failing to install, the driver often gives me an error that says the software "has not passed Windows logo testing".

Can anyone help me out here? Is this audio driver really what is causing my machine to crash every time I try to shut it down?

Thanks a lot,
Alex

My first thought would be to open up the device manager (right click on "my computer" and choose properties... then click on the hardware tab. next click the device manager button.) Find the listing for the audio device, highlight it and right click it, then uninstall. It will most likely have a yellow exclamation point next to it when you find it.

Then shut the computer down. Open the case and physically remove the audio card. Put the case back on and fire it up. After doing that, look on the audio card itself and see if it has any identifying marks... Company name, card name, version, model number, etc. If you find something and know the company that made the card, then go to their website and download a current driver. If you don't know the company that makes it head to http://www.driverguide.com and register for a free account. After you to that, you can type any info you found on the card into the search and it will come up with a bunch of drivers. Try to find the one that matches your model number exactly. Find the driver and download it. unzip it onto a floppy disk if it will fit, if not, put it in a directory on your C: drive in it's own folder. You can name it "audio driver" or whatever.

Next, shut down the PC and take off the cover (unplugging the computer of course) put the audio card back in, put the cover back on.

Now when you start up the computer again, it will most like find the card you just put back in and want to install a driver for it. Browse to the directory you created or the floppy drive... whichever you did, and install that driver.

If windows installs the driver on it's own, and sometimes it will without giving you and option... Just get back to the device manager, right click the audio card entry and choose "update driver". You can browse to the right folder, reinstall it and then restart the computer.

It just might work. If not, let me know.

Geff

Its a laptop ,im assuming for space saving thatit would have onboard sound !!

I have recently installed Windows XP Professional on my Thinkpad 600x. Everything in the installation went fine, I've installed a small amount of software...

Originally Posted by Claude_rus

I have the similar problem on my PC - it hangs during the startup, and after I restore the system in Safe Mode to the earlier point, it also blames Crystal SF (WDM) Audio driver. The most interesting fact is that I haven't changed ANYTHING in my PC for many months (absolutely nothing, even software, which I usually use). The only thing I installed - was a pack of patches for my Windows XP SP2 (AutoPatcher) from www.neowin.net. So, now I'm really surprised - I can't beleive, that this problem is caused by official Microsoft patches.

If somebody will be interested in this problem, these are details about my PC:

System: Windows XP SP2 with all updates
MB: Asus P4P800E-Deluxe, CPU: P4 2.8 Ghz,
Sound card: Terratec SixPack 5.1, Driver Version: 5.12.01.3057 (The last one from terratec.com)
Onboard sound card (AC97) disabled in BIOS

I'll try to make a clean installation of Windows today, maybe it can help. But still, I would appreciate if someone has any ideas about this problem.

Thanks in advance!