Clicking on firefox icon causes blue screen crash
This began Friday, Feb. 25, about mid day. The only changes to the system that morning were an update to an Adobe plugin, either Flash player or Shockwave, I'm not sure, and an update to the Scottrade Elite desktop trading app. Both of those changes occurred about 0900. The problems began about 1130 when the system, Windows 7 Home Premium had a blue screen crash. From that time on, I have uninstalled each of the apps mentioned. I cannot open Firefox to work on the plugins becuase every time I click on the icon I get a blue screen crash with the words "Page fault in non paged area" at the top. I've also uninstalled and reinstalled the Firefox app with no apparent beneficial effect. The Scottrade trading app has been reinstalled and works well, causing no further probs.
Modified by mrcart
Chosen solution
Hello all,
i just recived a mail from mrcart and i think it is most likely that his problems have been caused by "Iolo System Mechanic Pro":
"Windows 7 crashes with Blue Screen when running IE8, "page fault in nonpaged area" ... What that shows is that the ampse.sys driver is causing the crash. The ampse.sys driver is a driver for System Mechanic Pro. System Mechanic Pro has been known to cause issues in Windows 7 ...
kind regards / John Kirk.
Read this answer in context 👍 1All Replies (7)
Hello mrcart,
i think it is unlikely that firefox itself is causing an operating system crash, i had some time back an similar issue where a system of a friend of mine was crashing while using IE - thats the only app he used ... the system in his case had faulty ram, and i suspect you are facing some sort of hardware problem or faulty device driver.
Please read this (also lists steps what you can do): http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc957625.aspx
(personally) I would suggest you start by checking your ram, you can do this in two ways: Search in your Windows 7 Start Menu for "ram", you should find something like "Diagnose your computer´s memory problems" ... Or, you use the memtest86+ tool from here (e.g. download the iso, burn it and boot from the cd): http://www.memtest.org/
Check your eventlog for errors (e.g. disk errors, timeouts, etc).
If you cannot track the problem down (i would suspect a hardware problem or faulty device driver ... e.g. it could be your video card driver doing something wrong) you should seek help at your computer manufacturer, an experienced friend, or using some forum.
kind regards, John Kirk.
Modified by John Kirk
Thanks, John, Does your answer still hold true if IE 9 and Chrome browsers are both working well? If so, I will do the test you mentioned on the RAM. Not being any kind of a techie at all, I must say I don't understand how the other two browsers work well and FF does not, unless the prob is with FF.
Thanks for your time and attention.
~~~~Bob
It's still probably a RAM thing. Firefox may be accessing a specific (and bad) address in memory a certain way that IE or Chrome may just happen to skip over.
A "Page fault in non paged area" is likely to be caused by a system service or driver. Firefox wouldn't run in that space, only kernel drivers and services and (security) software runs at that level.
Does it still happen if you boot Windows in Safe mode (press F8 at boot window) ?
Hello mrcart,
tracking down such problems and findig the root cause for the crashes can be very easy and range to very hard ... there are always "usual suspects" which we mentioned (defective ram, faulty driver, buggy security software, corrupted filesystem, ...).
If you want, i can try to help you, have a look at my profile here (just klick on my username -> kirk22) i made my e-mail address visible there.
So, if you want my help, then provide me the following information and send me an E-Mail:
- Manufacturer/Type/Model of your computer (as exact as possible).
- How long do you have this computer, i.e. is it new or was it working flawlessly since one year.
- What "Security Software" (Virusscanner, Firewall, ...) do you use (please describe as exact as possible how the product(s) is/are named, an example: Symantec: Norton 360 4.0)
- Is it possible that you have more than one "Security Software" installed? I have seen systems with two (ore more) Virusscanners installed and this can also lead to crashes.
- Have a look at your c:\Windows directory if it does contain a folder named "minidumps". If you have a c:\Windows\minidumps folder, there can be files in there named like "mini021909-01.dmp". If there are such files, attach the latest one to the mail you send to me - This are "dump" files which the operating system writes to disk in event of an crash and can give a clue what is the cause.
Thats the help i can offer, as we already mentioned, it´s very unlikely Firefox itself is the cause for an operating system crash, so i think aside from me trying to help you, there is not much more we can do here in the Firefox Support Forum for you.
kind regards, John Kirk.
Chosen Solution
Hello all,
i just recived a mail from mrcart and i think it is most likely that his problems have been caused by "Iolo System Mechanic Pro":
"Windows 7 crashes with Blue Screen when running IE8, "page fault in nonpaged area" ... What that shows is that the ampse.sys driver is causing the crash. The ampse.sys driver is a driver for System Mechanic Pro. System Mechanic Pro has been known to cause issues in Windows 7 ...
kind regards / John Kirk.
Thanks to everyone who took the time and trouble to offer suggestions for my problem. I'm just glad I didn't have to replace RAM or anything more difficult than uninstalling a program.
It's nice to know there are people who are willing to help.
~~~~Bob