Blue screen of Death. Can software cause this???

[kes101]

Hello friends and thank you for looking. I have a problem with a friends PC. Its a brand new machine(built by me)its a 2.4 celeron/256ram/80gig hdd/dvd writer/epox motherboard. Its been working fine for about 4 weeks then my friend says its given him the blue screen of death twice(he has not made a note of the error codes). So i picked it up brought it home and ran a burn in tester on it for 3 hours testing all parts inc ram/cpu/hdd/ect and found no errors. I then ran a spyware scanner and found 144 infections which were 38 running processes and some 72 registry entries,anyway it turns out that my mate has connected to a file sharing site without a firewall or any anti virus. So my question is this... Can such nasties as spyware and viruses cause the blue screen of death??? Also one last thing is that he had some strange program that changed the mouse pointer into a little cartoon character(program called artic bear) at each shutdown windows would flash up a Little box saying that this artic bear application failed to initialize due to windows shutting down. Just wondered if this would add to the blue screen of death problem. I have wiped the machine clean and reinstalled XP. But i would like some feedback to the possible cause of this blue screen please.

 

[Crowley16]

YES

BSOD is *usually* caused by software not running properly, and viruses/adware/spyway definitely will "help" software to not run properly...

hardware problems are rare, but they do occasionally cause BSOD.

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Procrastinate Now!

 

[SJohnson4611]

I have had about 50 windows 98 machines getting the BSOD after a AVG update...

 

[kes101]

Thanks very much for the advise guys as usual tek tips is awesome. After a fresh installation of XP all is now well again. Apart from my friend that is who is beyond help even from tek tips!!!!!!!!