Crashy Crashy, Not Cool
Starting back on the 18th of May, I started getting frequent crashes of rundll32.dll on my laptop. This corresponded with me updating a bunch of drivers on my laptop. They seemed quite random, but always seemed to happen in response to actions that I made. Today I finally got fed up with it and decided to try to fix it since the last round of Windows Updates from last Tuesday didn’t fix the issue.
I first looked at the Reliability and Performance monitor, only to see that it didn’t give me anywhere near enough information to do anything. (In case you are curious, my index dropped from 6.60 to 2.96 while I had this problem, though I have also experienced a few blue screens while trying to sleep the lappy. Stupid HP drivers.) From there, I decided to Google for the answer, and happened upon a forum posting about a similar problem. At the end of the thread, Comodore mentions that you should run the command sfc /scannow. I was not familiar with this command, so I looked at the help for it and found out that it looks at all of the files that Windows protects and replaces them with the correct Microsoft versions if they are wrong. I went ahead and ran the command (it took about 20 minutes to run). When the command completed running, it reported that it had found issues and had successfully repaired all of them. I took a look at the log file, and it looks like it had to repair a lot of files. To make sure that all bad versions would get out of memory and be replaced by the good version, I rebooted my computer.
So far, I have not received any more of these rundll32 crashes, so it looks like it worked. I’ll keep an eye on it, but it looks like this problem is fixed.
