Question : Problem: WPN511 Driver Causes BSOD and corrupts hives

I had been using a Netgear WPN511 adapter with my laptop for quite some time, but all of a sudden, after running for 12 hours or so the laptop would freeze. I would have to power it down by pressing and holding the power button.  When it went to boot Windows, I'd get the error about  a registry hive file is missing or corrupt...same thing when trying F8. I tried to repair windows with the original disk, but, of course, it broke all my apps forcing me to reinstall them. The second time the crash occurred, I tried booting an off-line copy of windows and replacing the hive files with the files from the off-line copy. I got the same registry hive corrupt error.  I finally ended up restoring a two week old image of the hard drive and the latest backup of my data from the day before.  The good news is that I got the system back up and didn't lose any data (I take backups seriously).

The bad news is that I'm hesitant to use the card until I can get the issue resolved. I have a spare laptop drive that I can throw the image onto for testing, so if anyone can help with this, I can do testing with the spare drive instead of the production drive.  I've attached the crash dump files from the last crash and a current sysinfo file. The XML and DMP files were renamed to .TXT files to be able to upload the files.

Thank You!
Jon Smorada

Answer : Problem: WPN511 Driver Causes BSOD and corrupts hives

I tested using the spare drive and was able to get through about 24-hrs with no blue screen. I looked on Netgear's site and noticed that I was using driver version 4.0.140 and the latest is version is 4.2.214. I went ahead and upgraded the driver and transferred around 60GB from my file server to the laptop. So far, it's been stable.  I'll continue to beat it up for a few days to see if I can get it to crash.

One minor typo to my reply to Darr, the test drive is 160GB, not 180GB...