Viz Vista by Ed Tittel

In yesterday's blog, I reported on the appearance of reports for numerous (9 one day, 10 the next) "corrupt and unusable" VolumeShadowCopyXX entries in the System Log in Event Viewer. All of these originated from source Ntfs, the Vista file system manager.

In the past couple of months, I 've been grappling with graphics stability issues. Mostly, this has meant driver restarts where you get a message that reads something like "Display driver stopped responding and has recovered." Occasionally, this has involved a BSOD that mentions the Nvidia driver files nvlddmkm.dll or nvlddmkm.sys. When it happens, it seldom occurs more than twice a week. I keep checking the Nvidia driver download page, grabbing new drivers as they become available (including occasional betas), and hoping for the best.

Any time something surfaces in Event Monitor that I've never seen before, it always piques my interest. My usual practice is to scan the Event Monitor's Windows Application and System logs every Monday morning to see what might need my attention. This morning, among the items that caught my eye was this message "Application (pid 4684) cannot be restarted - Application SID does not match Conductor SID" from an unfamiliar source--namely the Restart Manager.

In keeping with my ongoing Vista troubleshooting exercise, I've gotten into the habit of dropping in on my Event Viewer every couple of days to see what kinds of errors and warnings are popping up. By keeping tabs on this information, and researching stuff I haven't seen before or don't understand, I keep learning more and more interesting stuff about Vista. This morning, I found a new error from the Volume Shadow Copy Service (which shows up in the Windows Application log as a source named VSS). Because VSS is important to maintaining Vista operating and file system integrity, I started digging more deeply into this right away.

In the wake of installing Vista SP1, I’ve been noticing various little “gotchas” that have popped up and require my attention as time goes by. It’s been about 4 to 5 months since SP1 hit, and I’ve been slowly and steadily inspecting and cleaning up in its wake.