175.16 - NVLDDMKM.dll error still happening... anyone else?

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Interesting... highly intensive areas full of motion seem to crash my game. GPU doesn't go any higher than 68C & I've been getting excellent FPS in all of the games I play on the 8800GTX. Not sure how to fix this issue. I think I'll move on to the GTX 260 or 280 very soon.
 
You say the monitor flickers? Could this be something related to power managment? I have heard that several times changing the power managment settings has helped.
 
I had the problem when I built my newest system (specs in signature)
I had no problems when I had Vista Ultimate 32bit installed.
I then went ahead and loaded Vista Ultimate 64bit once I found my DVD.
That's when it all went to hell. Trying to play any game would result in NVLDDMKM.dll not responding and then most of the time, followed by a BSOD.
I had not seen a BSOD since windows 98. Yes, I made it though the years of XP and never saw one. Lets also point out I kept my system very stable, and junk free.

Anyhow, I know a guy who posted in this forum for a few years now, and we thought it might be heat related, so I added fans, more thermal grease and all that junk. Still the same thing. Heck, I would even manage to have that driver crash when I was simply surfing the web.

Anyways, it turns out it was a stick of ram. I have browsed many other forums and found this to be true with most other users who were having this same issue.

I got my new ram rma'ed and stuck in the new sticks I got back, to get 8GB, and havent had that issue since.

I havent read though all the threads on this post, but I highly suggest taking out a stick at a time and seeing if anything changes for you.
I ran memtest86+ from a boot cd, and it told me my ram was fine.
Well, after removing a stick, it all stopped.
 
I'm not surprised that worked for you. Logically, it probably shouldn't have...the nvblahblahblah.dll error is really a Vista/Nvidia "certified" driver problem. However, I've heard so many things that people have randomly tried that seem to fix the issue, from disabling UAC to hacking the registry to just buying a new video card, that nothing really amazes me at this point.

Still waiting on eVGA to respond, by the way. I'd avoid having to answer me if I were them...lol.
 
I see that you guys have to seem to have this locked down to a Vista problem. Im not 100% sure that is correct. I have been to many other forums, where I'm not a member and seen a few other people having this problem on xp playing newer games. I have even seen a few people have this issue after (downgrading) (hehe) from a nvidia card to a ATI card and not cleaning all the nvidia drivers off their computer on both XP and Vista.

I don't feel as if I need to link anyone to any other forums, as [H] is supreme, but a quick search in google will find you tons of other people - more so than any other fix telling you that when they removed a stick of ram that was bad, it solved the problem.

It really seems as if that every computer fourm that deals with hardware has a forum of this type involving the NVLDDMKM issue.

I mean, seriously... It would be nice to see everyone that is having this issue do the trial and error of removing a stick of ram at a time to see if it fixes the problems or not.

May surprise some of you.

I see that you mentioned microsoft suggesting work arounds and other tips on resolving this issue. Maybe Microsoft cant find the issue because they're looking though drivers and operating system files and not the hardware.
 
There are comparable errors with ATI cards, as well...and while it's not necessarily a Vista problem, that's the OS that Ryan's running.

I've been dealing with this problem on and off for about three years now, and I wish it was always just a memory issue. I agree with you that it may work in some cases, but it doesn't work for all of them.

You may find this interesting, by the way: http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/28/0326209 They don't state a specific issue, but I can tell you that it was a direct result of that driver file.
 
I got fed up, did a fresh install of Vista 32 home, I'm going to install one thing per day and see when i start getting issues.... Sounds dumb and long but tons of people have this issue and needs to be fixed.
 
Well that was fast. Installed Vista 32 home. downloaded all available drivers. restart. got error!
 
I've ran memtest and came up error free... and never have crashes in XP. 99% positive my memory is just fine
 
Turning off all power management options in Vista seemed to have cleared up the issue for the time being.
 
Having all timers for specific power options changed to never & features turned to off.
 
do you mean like monitor, hd, comp power options so they dont time out when not in use? if so all that stuff is already off, always has been on any comp i have had
 
I had the monitor set to turn off after 20 minutes. Everything else was turned off before this.

Now all is off, changed to Forceware X v175.70 Beta & I haven't had any freeze-ups in games, as of yet..
 
I'd be willing to bet the power management had nothing to do with your fix. The 175.7x drivers seem to be pretty stable for some games, but screwed up for others. For example, world in conflict goes all rainbow color-ey, looks like you're high on LSD or something lol. Hellgate london on the other hand doesn't "insta-crash" when you start DX10 mode up.

I'd recommend you go back to 175.16, disable all the power management stuff, and THEN see what happens. Most likely, no change I bet.
 
This is something our support team encounters occasionally and can be a real pain to diagnose. Unfortunately there isn’t one step that will always fix this and the root of the error may not even be the video card. Windows communicates to the NVIDIA driver constantly and will report last thing it was accessing when a system error occurs. NVIDIA has a very good explanation along with several things to check when troubleshooting this error available at http://nvidia.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/nvidia.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=22. I hope this helps shed some light on the error and if anyone needs help beyond those steps in the above link to PM me.
 
I took a second look at the link you gave XFX support, and I still experience the problem after teching all those issues.

I did a fresh vista install, and ONLY installed SP1 (and all updates available on windows update besides drivers), nvidia nforce driver package 9.64, and nvidia forceware 175.16 WHQL drivers, and I still experienced the error. By having a fresh install, there were no programs that would be running that needed to be closed - the only programs running were right off the Vista DVD install and the nvidia drivers.

In addition, I left all drivers uninstalled for other hardware in the system, so things such as my X-Fi elite pro, mouse drivers, monitor drivers, wireless xbox controller receiver, and my 2 printers did not have their drivers installed.

I have yet to run prime95 in vista, but my CPU passed with flying colors for a 48hr test in XP, so I see no reason for it to fail in vista either, but it's something to try. I just don't have time to let it run for a day or so right now. As for my memory, it's passed through memtest with flying colors as well.

The only thing to try after this is physically removing the above items from the system. There is simply more to this picture then meets the eye, the error HAS to fall on Nvidia or microsoft's shoulders, as my system was completely bare bones and it still happened, there was simply no other hardware or drivers installed, or even software for that matter.
 
I had this error today after swapping out my eVGA 8800 GTX for 2 Zotac 8800 GTXs.

Here's what I did to fix it:

1) Change the "nvlddmkm.sys" file to "nvlddmkm.sys.old" (It'll be in c:\windows\system32\drivers\ folder)

2) Open a Command Prompt with administrator settings (start type "Command Prompt", right click on that and "Run as Administrator", this puts the prompt in "windows32" and 'elevated' mode)

3) cd to "c:\nvidia\winvista** (your version 32 or 64)\175.** (your driver number)". Will look like "cd c:\nvidia\WinVista64\175.19" or so.

4) Find nvlddmkm.sy_ , COPY this to your drivers folder (c:\windows\system32\drivers\ ).

5) in the command prompt, type "expand.exe nvlddmkm.sy_ nvlddmkm.sys"

Restart system.

Worked for me.

(Edited for clarity)
 
Sorry, I did not mean to imply that the video card is never the root when this error appears just that it isn’t the sole culprit in every instance. In your case, based on the things you have tried it very well may. I see that you have tried disabling SLI, have you tried with just one card in the system at a time as well or these video cards in another system?
 
Apallohadas said:
I had this error today after swapping out my eVGA 8800 GTX for 2 Zotac 8800 GTXs.

Here's what I did to fix it:

1) Change the "nvlddmkm.sys" file to "nvlddmkm.sys.old" (It'll be in c:\windows\system32\drivers\ folder)

2) Open a Command Prompt with administrator settings (start type "Command Prompt", right click on that and "Run as Administrator", this puts the prompt in "windows32" and 'elevated' mode)

3) cd to "c:\nvidia\winvista** (your version 32 or 64)\175.** (your driver number)". Will look like "cd c:\nvidia\WinVista64\175.19" or so.

4) Find nvlddmkm.sy_ , COPY this to your drivers folder (c:\windows\system32\drivers\ ).

5) in the command prompt, type "expand.exe nvlddmkm.sy_ nvlddmkm.sys"

Restart system.

Worked for me.

(Edited for clarity)
Click to expand...

Seems odd to me since I know that the inf includes the nvlddmkm.sys to be copied over. Is there something glitchy going on that increases the odds for the error to occur through the normal driver update process? I'll attempt your method, though I'm wondering if you did this in normal or safe mode. Thanks.
 
I had this problem, very occasionally at stock, then exacerbated after a CPU overclock to the point where, as soon as a 3D scene appeared, the driver would stop.

I boosted RAM voltage a tad - one step up in BIOS from 1.9 to 1.925 - and it stopped the problem entirely.

This likely won't help everyone or anyone, but just wanted to chime in in case it did.
 
XFXsupport: I haven't tried physically removing one of the cards and seeing what happens. Might be something to try on the weekend.

Apallohades: Twice now I've tried a completely fresh Vista install, and installed the 175.16 WHQL drivers, and both times have resulted in the problem, so I highly doubt thats the issue. For the sport of it though I tried that, no dice.

Neutronjockey: I'm running my ram at 2.1v already, which is what they're spec'd to run at for 400mhz operation, so I don't know if raising it any more really would be helpful. However, I tried running them at 266mhz and left the voltage at 2.1v - they're spec'd at 1.8v at 266, and it still crashed, which leads me to believe that's not the source of the problem.
 
hasoos said:
One thing I noticed on the technote listed above that some folks seem to have missed. It mentions that if you are playing a game where your frames per second drops under 10 fps, it could trigger this failure.
Click to expand...
Thats interesting that you mention that. I noticed that the few times I had the crash happen it would always slow down first. Like there would be a 15-20 second period where framerates would begin to drop or stutter right before the BSOD. So it would be obvious something was wrong before it happened.
 
CrimsonKnight13 said:
Seems odd to me since I know that the inf includes the nvlddmkm.sys to be copied over. Is there something glitchy going on that increases the odds for the error to occur through the normal driver update process? I'll attempt your method, though I'm wondering if you did this in normal or safe mode. Thanks.
Click to expand...

I did it in normal mode, and yes, I think there's a glitcch in the update process.
 
I also attempted the fix listed and it worked for about, 6 hours and then i started experiencing the problem again.

Another time, with 174.74 drivers i attempted something similar. I deleted the nvl.sys file from sys32 and then ran SETUP from in the \nvidia\win64\174.74 folder. This also fixed it for me for about 2 days.


My problems seem to be different depending on what drivers i use. With 175.16 I get crashes that require a hard boot. It doesn't BSOD on me, it freezes for a second, goes to a black screen, and then after about 30 seconds the audio loops and i am forced to hard boot.

Drivers such as 169.25 give me an almost identical problem where it will flicker, then freeze, then turn to a black screen, and then it revives and goes back in game. if i alt-tab out at any point in there i can see the sys tray icon for the nvl error.

It really sucks, i can't play almost any game since i did my hardware upgrade and went from XP 32bit to vista 64 bit.
 
This is a way around the NVLDDMKM.dll error (I think)
I know that with most current games, you'd want to have nVidia's drivers loaded.
But I don't see the reason when they're crashing your system..

If you go into Device Properties, find your video card adapter, and uninstall the driver, restart, and let Vista grab a working driver off of the Microsoft update site, you should remain fine.

I haven't tried playing any games with the standard drivers from m$ update, but I know for a fact you can atleast use your computer for spread sheets and surfing the web without NVLDDMKM.dll dying and giving you the BSOD.

I had e-mailed a few tech people from EVGA since they make my card, and they told me that they have heard plenty of problems (I used to have, and you guys are still having) but they need 30% of their daily calls to be involved with this problem, or they wont directly look into it.

Start complaining guys!
-g0at
 
l337*g0at, the problem with that "solution" is you're using microsoft's drivers, which are likely very out of date and do not contain all performance fixes and such.. it really isnt a solution at all
 
It's been known for a while the this is often a RAM issue.

Try new sticks just to see if it solves the problem.
 
TigerLord said:
It's been known for a while the this is often a RAM issue.

Try new sticks just to see if it solves the problem.
Click to expand...

Disagree completely.

I've seen more driver solutions than people swapping ram sticks as a cure.

Unless you have some concrete proof?
 
It did for me twice.

Plus try Google. The OP tried every software solutions.

You have another solution to help the OP?
 
I've had the same issue with 2 different PCs. RAM is out of the question for sure.
 
Its definitely NOT the first thing to do.

But once youve tried everything you can and still have that problem, swapping the ram takes but a few minutes and if it works youll be happy.

Ive had that problem countless times and twice in those times it was the RAM.

We are all enthusiasts and we all push our hardware to the limit, failure of that hardware is assured one time or the other, and in my experience rams fry more often than cpu, gpus or even motherboards.

Just my 2¢...
 
memtest86 = no errors. Windows XP works like a champ. NO software ever crashes besides DX10 games.

Don't think its the ram... for the like 3rd time lol
 
How can you have crashes in DX10 games when you most likely only have 9.0c in WinXP? I assume that you're talking about games that have support for DX10.
 
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