dwwin.exe crashes on winXP when shutting down

Have you tried looking in event viewer? That usually tells you why a program has crashed.

A good tip is to customize the start menu to show Administrative Tools - puts event viewer in a more readily accessible spot.

thanks for the tip.

however, there doesnt appear to be anything in there that relates to the crashes on shutdown.

what there is though is:
AMLI: ACPI BIOS is attempting to read from an illegal IO port address (0x71), which lies in the 0x70 - 0x71 protected address range. This could lead to system instability. Please contact your system vendor for technical assistance.

any idea what this is on about, and how serious it might be? it isnt occuring any where near shutdown though, so i dont think there is a connection.

Yes, I know exactly what that error message is! Your bios doesn't support XP. You need to download a bios update and flash the bios. Not for the nervous, but needs to be done. XP runs ACPI different from ME / 98 and the two aren't compatible - nice one MS...

At a guess I would say the other problem may be display related. FX 1.9 does pull some pretty fancy tricks which require quite a bit of graphics power. I know some nvidia cards struggle with it. The recent install of FX 1.9 is a bit of a coincidence. I don't use objectbar on XP, but I can't imagine that causing a problem. My only concern is dwwin deals with windows error message reporting and that it may be an indication of something more sinister. I should play about with FX first though.

FWIW, I recently upgraded my BIOS and it was a simple operation. I downloaded from my computer manufacturer the new BIOS to a floppy and restarted with the floppy in. It was self explanitory from there on. I am also running XP Pro and have not have any trouble with anything. Tip: Turn the Go Back/ Restore crap off.

fuzzy, the "flash your bios" idea has come up before, when i discovered that certain nvidea XP drivers *destroyed* my machine. i had to reformat to get a useable machine.

as for winFX 2 i have just dumped this, since it was causing me some serious problems. off to the newsgroup for a posting

i am not exactly keen to flash my bios. people say it is simple and nothing can go wrong. problem is if it goes wrong i have a useless machine.

True, it can go wrong - but only if the power is turned off mid flash. As TxTramp says the operation is very simple, it just requires strong nerves. Its the only answer for your ACPI problem.

you underestimate the power of human stupidity

where i work deals with computers a lot, and some of the things my work colleges (computer professionals) have done begger beleif.

one classic was "flash DVD drives bios", net result was a useless drive.

then there was the "apply completely the wrong bios to motherboard", which caused a bit of a mess.

i will have a look later to see if i can find the prog from the motherboard makers, but i am in no great rush to try this.

if (god forbid) anything goes wrong, is there any way to rescue the situation?

Fuzzy Logic - Its the only answer for your ACPI problem.

that was the other thing i ment to ask. does this actuall matter?

the reason i ask is that appart from nvidea drivers, and now winFX 2 (probably another driver issue really) this machine is as stable as a rock.