Early into using my Dell Latitude 820 with Vista Ultimate, I have been experiencing 0x9F (DRIVER_POWER_STATE_FAILURE) blue screens or hangs during power down/up sequences. If I press the power button, the laptop would start powering down but will many times stay up and blue screen after some time (sometimes several minutes after) or will just never shutdown until the laptop runs down the battery and annoy me the next morning with the the battery indicator going red and refusing to boot unless connected to power. Restart may not work at times. My colleague who got the identical laptop, never experienced anything remotely similar. So since I was playing with couple of power state tools to see how things worked, I figured perhaps a brand new installation of Vista is what would give me a break from these pesky power issues. Of course I played with power schemes a lot to see if any of that helps. None of that helped.

Well I reformatted my hard disk drive and installed Vista Ultimate and I did not see the shutdown issues for a while but the blue screens are back again. It just happened some time back but this time if I search for a solution Vista showed me this.

solutionfound

The KB article that the solution led me to, mentions that the issue apparently manifests when PPP connection is active and you put your computer to sleep or if you try installing or have installed NDIS Intermediate driver when you are using a PPP connection. That is not the case for me though. But I do have Cisco VPN client installed though which has Deterministic Networks Inc’s NDIS Intermediate Driver (dne2000.sys), which is being blamed in auto-analysis of the memory dump in windbg.

So I am not sure that this update indeed will fix my issues but then again Vista seems to have quite a few issues during power operations, such as this with IEEE 1394 FireWire devices leading to 0x9F BSODs similar to mine, this and this with High Definition Audio Devices not working after resume, this with BlueTooth not working after resume, this leading to “occasional” 0x7E (SYSTEM_THREAD_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED) blue screens with network devices during system wakeup.

The timestamp for installed version of dne2000.sys shows June 2005, so I am certainly going to be looking around for a newer version of dne2000 or Cisco VPN client. Of course if the Microsoft update does address the issue, that will just be jolly good 🙂

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5 Responses to DRIVER_POWER_STATE_FAILURE BSODs On My Vista Laptop

  1. Rey Zabala says:

    I am having the exact same problem and tried the exact same path to resolution with no success. I cannot disconnect my power cable while connecting to ethernet or wireless…any further luck locating an update to the vpn client?

  2. Satya Das says:

    Microsoft does not give that fix for free, so I have not applied the fix yet.

    But the laptop has been more stable after I uninstalled Cisco VPN software. Then I installed Cisco VPN Client 5.0.0.0340 and things have been better.  (you can find a download link here)

    There are still infrequent BSODs (once a week) however suggesting that the Microsoft fix may be needed.

  3. […] an earlier blog entry here, I shared my pain of Vista Blue Screens of Deaths (BSODs) with Cisco VPN Client. While most of […]

  4. Rickard says:

    I’m experiencing a simaual scenario on my private hp laptop. I have a regular Vista Home Premium. The only difference is that my BSOD appears when the computer is put into resting mode “VilolA¤ge” on swedish. The message is called IRQ_EQUAL_OR_LESS then and then followed by a fast reboot. I have also notices the name DNE2000. SYS in the bottom of the page. Any luck yet with the fix?
    Have a VPN client called Netscreen installed. Will try to uninstall this to see if it will solve my issues.

  5. Satya Das says:

    Interesting. Your bugcheck code is different from what I have seen, however you see dne2000.sys on your screen. In my case that driver was part of Cisco VPN Client. If you have not installed Cisco VPN Client on your machine, try to locate the application that is installing dne2000.sys on your machine and try updating or uninstalling the software. Let me know how that goes.

    I upgraded Cisco VPN client and have not seen the BSODs for some time now.

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