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Since installing the Windows 7 drivers for my onboard Bluetooth radio (a Qualcomm Atheros model for the Gateway DX4885 PC), I have been experiencing frequent Blue Screens (BSOD), approximately every other day.

I obtained the drivers from the manufacturer site, and Windows did not give any "unverified driver" warnings, so that facts lends them some legitimacy. The drivers alone did not allow me to use the headset as a regular audio input/output device, so I had to install the full Qualcomm Atheros Bluetooth Suite package (rather than just installing the drivers piece by piece in the Windows Device Manager console). I would imagine that Qualcomm/Atheros had implemented some testing to insure that its product did not crash all of the time, but something about my setup seems to cause these problems.

My system does produce crash dumps, but even those do not point to a consistent issue when I inspect them with WinDBG. On one, it identifies that the Bluetooth driver has crashed, but on another it points to my WiFi driver, and another my RAM disk driver (ImDisk). I have probably ten different memory dump files with eight different causes. But again, this all seemed to start when I installed the Qualcomm Atheros Bluetooth Suite for my onboard radio.

palswim
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1 Answers1

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The Qualcomm Atheros Bluetooth Suite installer includes a user space executable by the name of BtvStack.exe. It buries a value in the registry key HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer\Run, which causes this program to run on each user session/login.

This works just fine for a single user running a single Desktop session at a time, but I tend to use different users and multiple desktop sessions (via some Remote Desktop workarounds). As I did this, the BtvStack executable would be running multiple times, as different users, but I imagine initiating access to the drivers, causing resource conflicts, and thus BSODs (crashes, Blue Screens). I realized that I couldn't fault Qualcomm/Atheros or Microsoft for these issues I was having, since I run my system in an unsupported way, but I still wanted to find a way to allow me to both have multiple user Desktop sessions and use my Bluetooth radio.

To prevent the BtvStack executable from running for each session, I removed the value from the aforementioned key, and instead put it in my Start Menu's Startup folder for the particular user that I would want to use the radio. Since then, I have not hit a single Blue Screen. I think I have solved my issue.

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palswim
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