BSOD at shutdown

I just finished a few days ago fixing one of the most devious problems I've run into recently. It involved a computer running XP (localized in Norwegian, although that wasn't part of the problem) that was really not performing anywhere close to as well as it should. Sometime shortly after boot it would just start crawling. It seemed like there was some driver that was loading and causing a conflict, although it wasn't clear what that driver was. To top it off, there was a non-helpful BSOD at shutdown, making the whole thing a big pain to reboot.

What was it? After more hours of trial and error than I care to admit, I did figure out and fix the problem. At first I thought it was a conflict between Spyware Doctor and Symantec Anti-Virus. It seemed that when I turned on SD's "Kernel Compatibility Mode" performance got quite a bit better. But the BSOD was still there. And let me just say - having an option called "Kernel Compatibility Mode" seems, um, like poor design. That's a "we know that we will break the kernel, so let's just make it possible to fix it, but leave our poor original design the default" soft of issue. Come on guys. Just make the thing play nice by default!

Finally I found an excellent tool (DebugWiz) that helped me track down the culprit. Turns out that this compter had a Vietnamese AV program installed a while back, and when uninstalled it never removed it's device driver (bkavauto.sys). Now that the system was no longer completely installed, it was conflicting with both SAV and SD, and causing the BSOD on shutdown. Delete the file and its registry entries, and pow! Happy again.