Driver corrupting registry?

Tech-Archive recommends: Fix windows errors by optimizing your registry

From: yskp (anonymous_at_discussions.microsoft.com)
Date: 04/11/04 

Date: Sun, 11 Apr 2004 04:26:03 -0700

Hi,

Several times now we have observed the system shut down (either normally or by a bugcheck - we're currently running the HCT) and never get up, claiming that the SYSTEM registry file is corrupt.
On several occasions, copying SYSTEM.ALT over the old SYSTEM file would solve the problem, and on others even this would not help and we had to reinstall the OS.

We're guessing that this is the fault of our driver, of course, but have been unable to find any problem which could cause this. We've eliminated all our registry accesses for debugging, but it did not help.

Does anyone have any thoughts (or better yet - experience) on what can cause this to happen? Our driver is a disk driver, but it does not interfere with writes going to the Windows drive, so I doubt this is the problem. I've seen a suggestion that perhaps a buffer overrun or double-free might be the cause of this, as it could damage the CM data structures. However, we're using only non-paged memory, and AFAIK the registry code & data resides in paged memory. Or am I wrong?

Any insight will be greatly appreciated!

yskp