I have Windows 98SE on a PC a friend built for me in 1999 – FIC SD-11 motherboard, Athlon 500 CPU, 128MB RAM, Matrox G-400 Millenium 16MB Video, Hitachi monitor, SoundBlaster PCI 128.
Recently, while booting and after entering password, a blue screen appeared. It said:
Windows
Terminating thread due to a stack overflow problem. A VxD, possibly recently installed, has consumed too much stack space. Increase the setting of ‘MinSPs’ in SYSTEM.INI or remove recently installed VxD’s. There are currently 4 SPs allocated.
Press any key to continue_
I hit the space bar, and the same message came back. I tried Ctrl+Alt+Del and nothing happened. I pressed Esc next, and another blue screen appeared:
Windows
There are no spare stack pages. It may be necessary to increase the setting of ‘MinSPs’ in SYSTEM.INI to prevent possible stack faults. There are currently 5 SPs allocated.
Press any key to continue_
Again I hit the space bar and again nothing happened. So I tried Ctrl+Alt+Del again. This time the “Close program” window appeared. The mouse did not work. Finally, I shut the machine off with the button on the tower, then started up in Safe Mode. “Windows did not detect a mouse”. I shut down using the keyboard, rebooted, and everything seemed to be OK.
A few days later at boot-up, after entering my password the blue screen showed the second above message. As soon as I hit the shift key the computer shut off. When I turned it back on, there was no further problem, but I am still concerned.
I would like to know:
1. Should I remove a VxD? If so, how is this done?
2. Should I increase the setting of MinSPs in SYSTEM.INI? If so, how is this done?
3. What caused this trouble in the first place, and how concerned should I be about it?
I have not installed anything new on the computer recently.
