Page_Fault_in_nonpaged_area 0x00000050

I often find myself undertaking computer support for family members.

One has an Acer desktop PC with Windows XP on it.

It is a typical "casual user" PC and runs AVG free antivirus.

I had a phonecall saying that it wouldn't turn off.

I recommended holding the button and it turned off.

When turned on again it would get to the account selection page (or perhaps half way through loading the account and starting up) then crash and reboot.

Safe mode didn't help (or work) and nothing would make the machine complete booting up.

Turning off the automatic reboot on error got a Blue Screen Of Death to appear which said

"Page_Fault_in_nonpaged_area" "0x00000050"

This provided something to work on.

Googling suggested hardware faults, viruses and a few other things.

I have a Bart PE CD and booting the machine up with that worked OK.

Hardware tests using utilities on that CD all checked out OK and it was perfectly stable on Bart PE.

I then came across a very helpful hint in a forum which pointed me at a conflict between AVG and the Acer E-Lock Management utility.

I booted using Bart PE, found "eLock2FSCTLDriver.sys" in C:\WINDOWS\system32\eLock2FSCTLDriver.sys and renamed it and a similarly named file to have an underscore in front of them.

Having done that the PC booted (Hooray !) and I uninstalled AVG. I then uninstalled every useless and pointless Acer utility for good measure.

The machine now starts up fine.

I put on Microsoft Security essentials instead of AVG. I use this on a machine at home which had another AVG issue.

Hopefully this will help someone else.