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Wireless Network Driver Uninstall BSOD
Alright, so a bit of history here. This laptop started having BSOD issues after taking the free update to Windows 10. It was apparently due to network drivers so I had attempted to update a few of them, and thought the problem had gone away. I was wrong. I had the laptop plugged in via network cable, and am now learning the problems appear to have to do with the wireless network drivers. I didn't realize this until now as I generally use the laptop when I'm away from home, and haven't had a need for it until now.
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It started off with Driver Verifier's scans causing a blue screen, DRIVER_VERIFIER_DECTECTED_VIOLATION. Opening that, it was flagging ntoskrnl.exe, nwifi.sys, and I believe tcpip.sys. To prevent the laptop from hitting a BSOD I reset Driver Verifier's settings so it wouldn't run any scans, then went to work. (That should be the first three minidumps in the included attachment.)
I didn't have the Windows Debugging tools installed at the time, so I was using a program called "BlueScreenView" to dig into what could be an issue. I saw nwifi.sys in there, the NativeWiFi Miniport Driver. Alright, my WiFi drivers are Bigfoot Killer Wireless-N 1103 drivers. I saw that they're from 2011 (odd, WIndows says they're fully updated) so I check the website. I find drivers from 2013 with a higher version number, perfect. Searching for and downloading these drivers took some time, as the laptop would periodically BSOD with IRQL_UNEXPECTED_VALUE. (That would be the fourth and fifth minidumps.)
So here's where I hit the main issue. I did get the drivers. They require me to uninstall the previous Killer Network Manager suite in order to install the new version. Attempting to uninstall the previous suite version causes yet another BSOD, MEMORY_MANAGEMENT (the last three minidumps), which is where I am now. I have Windows Debugging tools installed now, and it's flagging "Ak27x64.sys" as the potential reason. Go figure, that's the wireless driver that's being uninstalled.
If I uninstall the driver manually through the Device Manager, it works just fine. However, the Killer Network Manager suite is determined to reinstall the driver before uninstalling the entire suite.
I could extract the driver from the installation archive (it has an option for that) and install it myself. However, I'm worried that the error itself means something worse than the uninstaller tripping over the driver. I'll probably attempt a Memtest in the near future, but hopefully someone here has ideas!
EDIT:
Ran a standard memtest, came back clean. That makes me think the un/installer was the issue, but maybe someone will see something else?
Last edited by UltimateZero; 26 Nov 2015 at 16:42.