Henry is nerdy

Every so often through the daily uses of my laptop I have to disconnect my Wifi or Ethernet while the laptop is on. No biggy right? Well Windows doesn't seem to think so. Every so often when I either forcefully disconnect the ethernet either wired or wifi the RPC Service in my XP install crashes and then I see this:
[URL=http://img169.imageshack.us/my.php?image=rpccrashlw5pp4.png][IMG]http://img169.imageshack.us/img169/459/rpccrashlw5pp4.th.png[/IMG][/URL]

Now for those that don't know what the RPC service in Windows XP does well it does pretty much every secondary service you take for granted. Copy/paste would not work across different programs without it. It also handles network, the process of connecting to and from a network, as well as audio and some other secondary systems for USB peripherals. And I'm only scratching the surface. The effect from the crash basically disables the socket connection for the clipboard for every running program. Some like Dreamweaver recover themselves after a few minutes. Others like Firefox; don't. It's not wonder that Microsoft made it so that you had to restart instead of trying to fix the issue with good programming.

So far here's my way to fix this without restarting:
First off you have to not panic. You only have 60 seconds to act so you have to get into command prompt and type in: shutdown -a. This will abort the shutdown. The next thing you have to do is restart the RPC service. There are actually two seperate services you need to start. To do this, also in command prompt:

net start rpcss
net start rpclocator

This will get you back running and have things like clipboard (copy/paste) back up. On my machine it also causes a run away memory leak (20kbytes added to it's stamp) in the Nvidia driver exe (nvsvc32.exe) as well as 15 and 35% CPU usage. I have to restart this exe (it's a service so just restart it in the services control panel [Start > Run > Services.msc]) to fix it. After forgetting this step one time I opened task manager to find a 500 megabyte behemoth which normally runs with a 4 megabyte memory stamp.

Unfortunatly I still see bugs I don't know how to fix from the result of this crash and Google isn't very helpful. Almost all the results are for the msblaster worm which caused this crash forcefully a few years back. My crash is clearly not because of msblaster but has a very different catalyst.

Anyone know anymore steps I can take?

• 23 months ago
• Eric
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• 23 months ago
• kman
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