Zone Alarm Firewall + New Update = BSOD
StarDolphin
California Join Date: 2015-08-02 Member: 206651Members
California Join Date: 2015-08-02 Member: 206651Members
I use Zone Alarm (http://www.zonealarm.com) which is a firewall program that blocks internet access to applications until you explicitly approve them.
It causes a pop-up window to happen when a new (or updated) application tries to access the internet. I don't recall entirely what happened on the last update, but I think NS2 used to crash when it couldn't see the internet on the server browser, but it was ok because I got the pop-up and could whitelist NS2 and it worked the next time.
It is now crashing NS2 in a way that you can't kill it from Task Manager, and if you try to log out it causes a BSOD!
(What I am assuming is happening: NS2 doesn't handle the edgecase where windows says it should have access to the internet resource but it is blocked. Total guess).
Turning off Zone alarm allows me to connect. I'm assuming if I manually whitelist NS2.exe it will work as well. However, I figured causing an BSOD is a bad escalation over a simple app crash so I would report it.
Tech Support zip: https://www.dropbox.com/s/rfvpmc93kkulkhw/tech_support.zip?dl=0
I just installed windowsdbg to be able to open the minidump file from the crash, I can get the exact error on the BSOD
It causes a pop-up window to happen when a new (or updated) application tries to access the internet. I don't recall entirely what happened on the last update, but I think NS2 used to crash when it couldn't see the internet on the server browser, but it was ok because I got the pop-up and could whitelist NS2 and it worked the next time.
It is now crashing NS2 in a way that you can't kill it from Task Manager, and if you try to log out it causes a BSOD!
(What I am assuming is happening: NS2 doesn't handle the edgecase where windows says it should have access to the internet resource but it is blocked. Total guess).
Turning off Zone alarm allows me to connect. I'm assuming if I manually whitelist NS2.exe it will work as well. However, I figured causing an BSOD is a bad escalation over a simple app crash so I would report it.
Tech Support zip: https://www.dropbox.com/s/rfvpmc93kkulkhw/tech_support.zip?dl=0
I just installed windowsdbg to be able to open the minidump file from the crash, I can get the exact error on the BSOD
Comments
1) Have Zone Alarm Running
2) Open NS2
3) Open Server Browser
Game will freeze. Can alt-tab to other running programs, but game is frozen and can't get back to desktop
(Optional) Task Manager Kill, taskkill /f, Task Manager kill process tree all fail
4) Log out/Shutdown: BSOD will happen
Tech Support Zip from right after these steps:
Haven't had much luck getting windows debugging working on my desktop. I can provide minidump file if desired. Windows reporting has this lovely useless message:
"The computer has rebooted from a bugcheck. The bugcheck was: 0x0000007e (0xffffffffc0000005, 0xfffff88014b915ff, 0xfffff8800d9db888, 0xfffff8800d9db0e0)."
1) Have Zone Alarm Running
2) Open NS2
3) Open Server Browser
Game will freeze. Can alt-tab to other running programs, but game is frozen and can't get back to desktop
(Optional) Task Manager Kill, taskkill /f, Task Manager kill process tree all fail
4) Log out/Shutdown: BSOD will happen
Tech Support Zip from right after these steps:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/7kdiq37rorbgolt/tech_support2.zip?dl=0
Haven't had much luck getting windows debugging working on my desktop. I can provide minidump file if desired. Windows reporting has this lovely useless message:
"The computer has rebooted from a bugcheck. The bugcheck was: 0x0000007e (0xffffffffc0000005, 0xfffff88014b915ff, 0xfffff8800d9db888, 0xfffff8800d9db0e0)."
Overall this sounds more like a crash caused by ZoneAlarm triggered by NS2, so nothing we can really fix at our side. ZoneAlarm is known for causing these kind of issues also with other software and OS services as well so it doesn't really surprise me.
What you maybe could try to avoid the crash is to lower the amount of pings NS2 sends out via the Steamworks API per minute to give ZoneAlarm the chance to cover up.
For that open under Steam the settings -> In-Game -> Lower the value of In-Game server browser: max pings / minute
ns2 doesnt run under kernel, zonealarm.. I think it did.. not sure.
Hard to judge without the actual dmp file. In c:\windows or c:\windows\minidump, are most likely those recent dmp files.. Can you zip and give one of those?
1) Boot NS2
2) Alt-Tab out (before opening server browser) (or use Windowed Mode). Zone Alarm window "Allow NS2.exe?" Happens as soon as you start NS2.
3) Can go back into NS2 now, it will work
Well this is weird. Apparently the ATI Driver is crashing. Somehow ZA + NS2 cause a problem state for the graphics driver? That is... not intuitive at all. Unless the graphics diag driver was trying to phone home or something and they didn't handle that use case...
https://www.dropbox.com/s/84m9bott3gd48yq/report.html?dl=0
(A quick Google searh suggests this may be a known issue with ZA? http://www.sevenforums.com/bsod-help-support/214029-bsod-atikmdag-sys-atimpag-sys-dxgmms1-sys.html )
Also, that is an awesome tool. Thanks for the link!
Yeppers, that is what I did. (You have to re-add items every time an exe is updated, say when a new patch is downloaded that changes the .exe file
I wanted to report it because 1) It was a 100% reproducible BSOD, which is not usually the case (Most times I've run into BSOD problems with computers they are very transient
I guess it could of easily been either ZA or ATI code that changed and it was only the update to the .exe file that caused the code path to be triggered again...