h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

See if anyone can figure this...if I leave windoze to boot on it's own, it gets so far and freezes. If I do it safe mode it does the same. If, on the other hand, I do a step-by-step confirmation selecting yes for everything then the first time it freezes after the file nidswan.vxd but if I do it again, windoze loads fine...

Any idea whats going on? Done a bunch of virus scans and I appear virus and scumware free. Done a speeddisk (defrag) yesterday, done a diskcheck (scandisk) about 40 times today....

I got no clue

The only thing I can think of is that there is a faulty assumption in the driver, which only really works with warm boots.

I had a similar problem, also flagging up the problem after a .vdx file.

I cured it by moving that machine entirely to linux, but it is not always practical or desirable to do so.

I got linux on here too and thats fine so you might have a point. I can't stand windoze but there's some things linux just cant run, unfortunately

Ndiswan.vxd is used as part of Dial-Up Networking, so I'm assuming that you connect to the net using dial-up. Did a quick search using google and pulled up this which claims will solve the problem.

Go to Start, Settings, Control Panel, Add/Remove Programs, Windows setup tab, Communications, Details.
Un-check the Dial-Up Networking radio button, it will also uninstall Dial-Up Server and a few other components. Once they have uninstalled, restart your machine.
Go through the same process except this time check the Dial-Up Networking radio button (I.E. re-install it. It may be a good idea to re-install the other 3 components as well).
Restart your machine and say goodbye to Ndiswan.vxd error.

Almost forgot. Make a note of your dialup ssettings (phone numbers, usernames, passowrds, etc) cos you'll probably lose them uninstalling dialup networking.

guess what the last alteration I made to my system settings was

Thanks for that.