[SOLUTION] XP won’t boot after Tue, Aug 10 Windows Updates

SUMMARY: A problem with ATI video card drivers and either KB2160329 or KB2079403 caused this problem.  (If you narrow it down, please comment.)

I have a customer that called because his Dell Optiplex 745 with Windows XP SP3 computer would automatically reboot after the Windows splash screen, but before the Windows login screen appeared. The strange this was that I could not get it to show a blue screen, even after I verified the setting in Control Panel > System > Advanced tab > Startup and Recovery Settings and chose to Disable Automatic Reboot on System Failure at the Safe Mode menu screen.

The good thing was that it would boot to Safe Mode. I found that it did 14 Windows Updates prior to the last time it worked properly. I searched on Google to see if anyone was experiencing big problems with any of them, but nothing looked promising.

Here is the crash in the Event Log:
The computer has rebooted from a bugcheck. The bugcheck was: 0x0000001a (0x0004128b, 0x000052d0, 0x00000000, 0xbec00000). A dump was saved in: C:\WINDOWS\Minidump\Mini081310-02.dmp.

I didn’t find much on Google about that either, besides that it was a “MEMORY MANAGEMENT” error.

I started from the bottom of the list of updates and removed four (KB2183461, KB982214, KB2115168, KB981852), restarted, but still the same problem.

Then I removed KB2079403 and KB2160329, rebooted and Windows worked again! So the problem is one of those.

Using great software from Resplendence, called WhoCrashed, I found this as the culprit of my crash:
On Fri 8/13/2010 1:28:55 PM your computer crashed
This was likely caused by the following module: ati3duag.dll
Bugcheck code: 0x1A (0x4128B, 0x52D0, 0x0, 0xBEC00000)
Error: MEMORY_MANAGEMENT
Dump file: C:\WINDOWS\Minidump\Mini081310-03.dmp
file path: C:\WINDOWS\system32\ati3duag.dll
product: ATI Technologies Inc. Radeon DirectX Universal Driver
company: ATI Technologies Inc.
description: ati3duag.dll

It looks to me as though my video card drivers combined with the Windows patch caused this problem.

It has an ATI Radeon HD 2400 with 8.582.0.0 drivers from 2/3/09.

Then I went to ATI’s site to download an updated driver (today it is 8.753).

After rebooting, I installed all the Windows Updates and it rebooted fine!!