Viz Vista by Ed Tittel

In writing about my trials and tribulations with Windows Vista on my production PC over the summer, I summarized my situation in a blog entitled "Time for a new motherboard?" on September 20. By the beginning of October things with the system had quieted down enough, thanks to switching to a single-vendor security solution (PC Tools Spyware Doctor with Antivirus, plus the PC Tools Firewall, and their ThreatFire behavioral malware blocker) and making some other software and configurations changes, that I thought I had the hiccups behing me. I was down to random problems once a week, and went three whole weeks without a single BSOD.

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.

This looked just plain weird to me. When I checked Reliability Monitor and the installation of the generic volume shadow copy devices I couldn't make out a pattern even though it was there to be found. I even posted queries about this to vistaforums.com, techsupportforum.com, and to Microsoft Tech Support, but it took a Facebook email to one of the demiurges in the Windows pantheon--namely, Mark Russinovich--to get to the bottom of the matter (more on this to follow at the end of this story).

This morning, I began my day with some modest self-congratulation, or perhaps just a small sigh of relief that my recent Vista crises have abated. It's now been 9 days since my last bluescreen and my System Stability Index in Reliability Monitor is nearly at 8.0 for the first time since August 11. I sincerely hope I'm not jinxing myself to make this statement but it appears that my production system is finally stable. Zounds! What a wild ride it's been.