I have been having the same problems with many latitude C840 laptops, as well as a few D800s.
The C series Latitudes I have seem to be showing symptoms 2 and 3 primarily. These symptoms occur very shortly after loading SP2 from an update CD or from windows update.
10-20% - 60 second countdown on NT Authority shutdown after services.app fails.
70%+ - empty device manager, no network connections, and no way to add them.
I have been looking for a fix since mid-september, and so far haven't come up with anything of substance.
An image I built of a sucessful SP2 installation for Latitude D800s seems to hold up to replication. However, each new installation, it re-loads half of the system drivers on first run. Previous images of the same software, excepting WinXP SP1 have no such driver load problems.
BTW, These are being cloned to identically spec'd machines. Once in a while, on the D800s with SP2, I have to dump all the network drivers, (1394, Broadcom Ethernet, and Dell 1400 Wireless adapters) and reload them in order for the adapters to connect. Again, not the case with SP1.
I manange more than 200 Dell Latitude laptops, C810, C840, and 2 generations of D800s. and so far my recommendations to ALL of my clients have been to avoid the service pack 2 like a plague, unless I install it from a known good image. For the few that don't pay attention, and download it anyway, I usually end up re-imaging the partition back to my WinXP Pro SP1 image, which seems to be the only sure fix so far.
After some searching it seems that deleting the ENUM key is not fatal for the stability of the system.
This is what I do to solve my problems:
Step 1) If possible I delete the McAfee AV software
Step 2) Delete the ENUM registry key in HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet | ControlSet003 | ControlSet002 (if exists) | ControlSet001 (seems that ENUM key never exist in this key until I delete all ENUM keys and reboot....)
Step 3) Reboot after step 2, login and let Windows detect all 'new' hardware, the ENUM keys are regenerated and the problem with services.exe causing reboots should be solved.
Step 4) Reboot after step 3, if step 1 failed because of systematic reboots, uninstall McAfee, reboot the machine, reinstall the McAfee AV software. (This is needed because the Networks Associates McShield service won't start properly anymore). If Step 1 succeeded, I just install McAfee AV software.
Step 5) Reboot after step 4, it seems that by deleting the ENUM keys the sound is not working anymore. The soundcard is installed but in control Panel, Sound and audio devices doesn't detect Audio devices. I used the tip on this thread:
http://www.annoyances.org/exec/forum/winxp/t1066427444
to install "PnP software enumerator". Used a "swenum.inf" from W98SE cdrom and swenum.sys from the system32\Drivers folder. Installed the device with "Add hardware".
Step 6) Reboot after step 5 and everything is now working normally ( probably until I detect another glitch :p )
Services.exe doesn't crash anymore, McAfee is enabled and running fine, Device manager is populated, No new unknown devices at startup, Sound is working and systems are running stable again. Due to a number of reboots, these steps are taking me about 20 minutes per machine.
PS1: I installed always the latest flashbios.
Until now I had a DELL GX240 that were severely impacted by SP2 release, GX260 and GX270 are running stable but are detecting +10 new unknown devices at startup (btw also present on GX240 but it was _not_ running stable anymore).
thanks for the proceedure, however, I am trying this on a C840 Latitude, and I am unable to delete the ENUM keys in the regestry, per instruction 2. It gives me an error saying it is unable to delete the key.
I am likely going to have to re-load this machine, but I will keep my eye on this thread, as I am still looking for a solution to running SP2 on these machines in the long run.
I also used to get errors when trying to delete the Enum key. This is because of permission problems on one of the subkey's.
First I let the group Administrators take ownerschip of the ENUM key and all subcontainers and object. Once that is done, I reset all (security) permissions on all child objects to the same permissions as the ENUM key (with group Administrators full control).
In 99% of the cases this worked and I could delete the Key. Sometime not all keys could be deleted and one or two subkey's still existed. The strange part is, I could delete these when I manually deleted them, starting from the key at the bottom in the tree and working my way up to the Enum key. But this only happened twice or so.
It may not be applicable to your situation, but I've been having problems with Services.exe crashing after 0:60:00 of use, and resulting in the same "...will shut down in 0:01:00" message.
I've found it to be Security Update KB910437 - if you exclude it from the big (40+) batch of Windows Updates, reboot, wait 1 hour, install KB910437
by itself, then continue with any other updates/software, it seems to stabilize.
This, however, is using a Win XP Pro SP2 CD - I'm not
upgrading to SP2 at any point, thank Cthulu.
My experience has been repairing it on about 10 systems so far - 4 Latitude D610s, 1 Latitude D810, 1 Latitude L400 manuf 2001, 1 Latitude C600 manuf 2002?, 1 OptiPlex SX280, 1 OptiPlex 170L, and 1 Inspiron 6000. I've also found that once you start experiencing these Services.exe crashes, you MUST rebuild, you can't just remove the offending Windows Update and move on.
I've tried to work with Dell support on this, and they claim no knowledge, saying it obviously must be a M$ problem, and that they don't know how to get ahold of M$ at all.
DesignLaptops
2 Posts
0
January 19th, 2005 21:00
The C series Latitudes I have seem to be showing symptoms 2 and 3 primarily. These symptoms occur very shortly after loading SP2 from an update CD or from windows update.
10-20% - 60 second countdown on NT Authority shutdown after services.app fails.
70%+ - empty device manager, no network connections, and no way to add them.
I have been looking for a fix since mid-september, and so far haven't come up with anything of substance.
An image I built of a sucessful SP2 installation for Latitude D800s seems to hold up to replication. However, each new installation, it re-loads half of the system drivers on first run. Previous images of the same software, excepting WinXP SP1 have no such driver load problems.
BTW, These are being cloned to identically spec'd machines. Once in a while, on the D800s with SP2, I have to dump all the network drivers, (1394, Broadcom Ethernet, and Dell 1400 Wireless adapters) and reload them in order for the adapters to connect. Again, not the case with SP1.
I manange more than 200 Dell Latitude laptops, C810, C840, and 2 generations of D800s. and so far my recommendations to ALL of my clients have been to avoid the service pack 2 like a plague, unless I install it from a known good image. For the few that don't pay attention, and download it anyway, I usually end up re-imaging the partition back to my WinXP Pro SP1 image, which seems to be the only sure fix so far.
I will post if I find anything more.
gjelu
3 Posts
0
January 20th, 2005 11:00
This is what I do to solve my problems:
Step 1) If possible I delete the McAfee AV software
Step 2) Delete the ENUM registry key in HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet | ControlSet003 | ControlSet002 (if exists) | ControlSet001 (seems that ENUM key never exist in this key until I delete all ENUM keys and reboot....)
Step 3) Reboot after step 2, login and let Windows detect all 'new' hardware, the ENUM keys are regenerated and the problem with services.exe causing reboots should be solved.
Step 4) Reboot after step 3, if step 1 failed because of systematic reboots, uninstall McAfee, reboot the machine, reinstall the McAfee AV software. (This is needed because the Networks Associates McShield service won't start properly anymore). If Step 1 succeeded, I just install McAfee AV software.
Step 5) Reboot after step 4, it seems that by deleting the ENUM keys the sound is not working anymore. The soundcard is installed but in control Panel, Sound and audio devices doesn't detect Audio devices. I used the tip on this thread:
http://www.annoyances.org/exec/forum/winxp/t1066427444
to install "PnP software enumerator". Used a "swenum.inf" from W98SE cdrom and swenum.sys from the system32\Drivers folder. Installed the device with "Add hardware".
Step 6) Reboot after step 5 and everything is now working normally ( probably until I detect another glitch :p )
Services.exe doesn't crash anymore, McAfee is enabled and running fine, Device manager is populated, No new unknown devices at startup, Sound is working and systems are running stable again. Due to a number of reboots, these steps are taking me about 20 minutes per machine.
PS1: I installed always the latest flashbios.
Until now I had a DELL GX240 that were severely impacted by SP2 release, GX260 and GX270 are running stable but are detecting +10 new unknown devices at startup (btw also present on GX240 but it was _not_ running stable anymore).
Message Edited by gjelu on 01-20-2005 08:28 AM
DesignLaptops
2 Posts
0
January 26th, 2005 18:00
I am likely going to have to re-load this machine, but I will keep my eye on this thread, as I am still looking for a solution to running SP2 on these machines in the long run.
gjelu
3 Posts
0
January 27th, 2005 05:00
First I let the group Administrators take ownerschip of the ENUM key and all subcontainers and object. Once that is done, I reset all (security) permissions on all child objects to the same permissions as the ENUM key (with group Administrators full control).
In 99% of the cases this worked and I could delete the Key. Sometime not all keys could be deleted and one or two subkey's still existed. The strange part is, I could delete these when I manually deleted them, starting from the key at the bottom in the tree and working my way up to the Enum key. But this only happened twice or so.
cschiltz
5 Posts
0
June 1st, 2006 19:00
I've found it to be Security Update KB910437 - if you exclude it from the big (40+) batch of Windows Updates, reboot, wait 1 hour, install KB910437 by itself, then continue with any other updates/software, it seems to stabilize.
This, however, is using a Win XP Pro SP2 CD - I'm not upgrading to SP2 at any point, thank Cthulu.