System restarts rather than goes into stand by

[TBF20]

Hey there,
I recently installed avast! Free Antivirus, but since installing I've been experiencing something strange when trying to put my PC into stand by mode. I'm on Windows XP Home with the latest Microsoft updates.

I'll go through the usual Start > Turn off Computer > Stand By process, and the PC will behave normally until just before it's about to turn off.

Windows will close down and take me to the screen where it says Windows is preparing to stand by, but then it restarts instead of going into stand by mode.

This happens about 50% of the time I try to go into stand by. The other 50% it goes into stand by just fine.

After one of the first times I experienced this restart, after Windows had loaded it came up with an error window (dwwin), stating Windows experienced an error and wanted me to submit the error report.

I hadn't experienced this issue prior to installing avast. Is this perhaps a known issue? And if so, is there a known fix?

Thanks!

[DavidR]

Have (or did) you another Anti-Virus installed in this system, if so what was it and how did you get rid of it ?

I used your third paragraph as a google search string and it brings up a lot of hits, this is just one of them, http://www.aumha.org/win5/a/shtdwnxp.php.

So it seems that there could be a crash happening that instead of generating a BSOD it just restarts.

[TBF20]

I previously had AVG Free Edition 2011, and I used the AVG uninstaller to get rid of it, then did a reboot before installing avast! Free Antivirus.

It could be crashing, but I've only had dwwin generate an error report a single time after the restart happened. I've yet to experience the restart issue when turning off the PC, it only seems to happen when choosing Stand By.

[DavidR]

You need to change the action on a crash to BSOD rather than to reboot as you can gather information from it. My Computer, View system information, System Properties, Advanced, Startup and Recovery and click the Settings button.

From here uncheck the Automatically Restart option (see image), at the bottom of the image you can also see where the dump file and its name are stored. The %SystemRoot%\ is c:\Windows and the file name memory.dmp, you can do a search for memory.dmp and see if it already exists. Also depending on the debugging information you have selected there may well be mini dump files in the c:\windows\minidump folder.

[TBF20]

Alright, I set it so it wont restart upon crash, and it stopped restarting when I try to Stand By.

It still only goes into stand by around 50% of the time. Rather than restarting on the times Stand By doesn't work, it presumably loads an error window. My monitor itself goes into stand by so I can't actually see the error screen to confirm that or read what it contains, haha

I've got the minidump folder and it seems to have an entry for each of the past 3 days, which is around how long I've been having this issue for. I don't seem to have a program that can make sense of the file contents though.

[DavidR]

If it happens again, make a not of when it happened, time and date and following that ensure that any minidump file relates to that time.

Then you could upload these to avast for analysis. The process would be one of first compressing any corresponding minidump files into a zip file, giving it a unique name like TBF20-minidump.zip, etc.

I would also advise creating a readme.txt file using notepad and place that in the TBF20-minidump.zip file. This should contain the background information (basically a copy and past of your first couple of posts), a link to this topic, forum user name and email address, etc.

This gets uploaded to ftp://ftp.avast.com/incoming - Using Internet Explorer, Connect to the link and drag the file into the Right pane and drop it, that starts the upload, you don't have read access to this folder.
Or
How to upload it using the Run command-line in Windows: Windows Key + R (to get the run box), copy and paste this

Code: [Select]

explorer ftp://ftp.avast.com/incoming and drag the zip file into the window, from another explorer window.