vista 64, explorer and dvd

[mito]

So I have windows explorer open, listing the contents of a DVD.

I eject the DVD. Explorer closes. On two other occasions I got one of those GPF errors.

Vista still has to mature.

But I like the OS.

 

[Rainbow Man]

I was used to having explorer bluescreen when an optical disc was popped out and whinedows still had file locks or whatchamacallit on stuff on that disc.

Not sure if XP still did that, I think not. But various versions of win9x sure did it.

It might be some throwback bug from a decade ago that snuck into the sourcecode..

I guess you're just going to have to go into the habit of closing up your explorer windows for now. Vista still loses track of systray icons when explorer crashes whihc just is a total PITA in my opinion since I try to minimize as much as I can into the tray.

I don't know if you do the same but if so then having explorer crash would probably cramp your style a bit until next reboot. It gets real hard to access a program after its icon vanishes..
Peavce.

 

[aaaaa00]

I was used to having explorer bluescreen when an optical disc was popped out and whinedows still had file locks or whatchamacallit on stuff on that disc. Not sure if XP still did that, I think not. But various versions of win9x sure did it.

A bluescreen should absolutely not happen on modern Windows just because you popped out an optical disc. The first thing I would suspect is a buggy filter driver on the optical disc driver stack. Probably something to do with a CD burning program, daemon tools (or other ISO mounter), a media player driver, or possibly a copy protection driver.

Vista still loses track of systray icons when explorer crashes whihc just is a total PITA in my opinion since I try to minimize as much as I can into the tray.

This a bug in your applications, not Explorer.

When Explorer restarts, it broadcasts a "TaskbarCreated" message. Applications are expected to repopulate their tray icons if they so desire by handling this message.

Straightforward sample code on how to correctly implement this is available here:

"Taskbar Creation Notification"
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa969325.aspx

The mechanism has been this way for years and years, since Win98.

 

[aaaaa00]

So I have windows explorer open, listing the contents of a DVD.

I eject the DVD. Explorer closes. On two other occasions I got one of those GPF errors.

Do you have any burning programs installed? What media players do you have installed?

If you give me a crash dump, I can probably figure out who caused it in 20 minutes.

 

[mito]

Yeah, I was using Clone DVD and then Nero, but those weren't active during the incident.

I agree with you about Windows not being allowed to give us a BSOD in 2007 because of a simple thing such as ejecting a disk...

 

[aaaaa00]

Yeah, I was using Clone DVD and then Nero, but those weren't active during the incident.

It doesn't matter if they weren't active. If a program installs a filter driver onto your system, then the driver will always be active as long as the optical drive is plugged in. Do you have iTunes, Napster, or any media player installed? Many of them tend to install their own drivers into the optical disc driver stack.

I agree with you about Windows not being allowed to give us a BSOD in 2007 because of a simple thing such as ejecting a disk...

All I can say is I've never seen a case in modern Windows (anything newer than Win2000/XP) where that occured that wasn't due to a 3rd party driver installed, or faulty hardware/firmware.

 

[mito]

Do you have iTunes, Napster, or any media player installed? Many of them tend to install their own drivers into the optical disc driver stack.

This is getting interesting.

I have SMPlayer, Cyber DVD, Clone DVD and the regular Windows Media Player.

I don't have those exotic players like iTunes, Napster, etc...

I try to keep Windows as clean as possible.

What exactly is a filter driver?

 

[aaaaa00]

What exactly is a filter driver?

Everything you ever wanted to know (and probably more than you ever wanted to know) about storage filter drivers:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms803150.aspx

Simple explanation:

A filter driver is a driver that sits in between two drivers on the driver stack or on top of the driver stack for a particular device.

For example, a hypothetical driver stack for a device could look like this:

program -> OS -> device driver -> controller driver -> PCI bus driver.​

A filter driver could load itself like this:

program -> OS -> filter driver -> device driver -> controller driver -> PCI bus driver​

And so be able to monitor or alter requests coming from the OS or the data being returned to the OS by the device.

There are many different kinds of filter drivers: network, storage, audio, etc, and they are normally extremely useful for legitimate purposes. For example your firewall or your antivirus program will probably have filter drivers of some sort installed on your system.

A storage filter driver is a specific kind of filter driver that sits in between the file system and the driver for your storage device, and has the power to monitor or optionally modify the IO requests that come from the filesystem.

An optical storage filter driver is a storage filter driver that only attaches to driver stacks involved with optical media.

These types of drivers are commonly used by CD burning programs to allow them to send normally unsupported commands directly to the drive, copy protection systems to monitor and/or intercept requests to the drive, diagnostics programs to monitor the IO requests going up and down the stack, ISO-mounting tools to redirect requests to a file instead of letting the requests go to the device, etc etc etc.

Since they are kernel mode components, they can be somewhat tricky to write correctly, and so many filter drivers can have bugs. Also, since they are kernel mode components they have full access to the entire system, and thus can be used for nefarious purposes. For example, one component of the Sony rootkit was a filter driver that attached to your file system, and prevented it from returning files with certain names.

One last thing, when you said that your computer crashed if you eject the CD, do you mean on modern Windows (2000/XP/2003/Vista) and do you mean bluescreen for real or just Explorer crashing?

Because if it's just Explorer crashing it's probably not a filter driver causing it, but possibly an Explorer extension. (Or maybe a bug in Explorer itself.)

And here is more information that you probably ever wanted to know about Explorer extensions:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa969287.aspx

 

[Davros]

so would a glide wrapper be considered a filter driver ?

 

[aaaaa00]

so would a glide wrapper be considered a filter driver ?

A filter driver runs in kernel mode so I don't think a glide wrapper actually qualifies as one, since it is a DLL and just runs in user mode.