Vista RC1 Install

The other night, I installed Vista RC1 via VMWare. Before doing so, I made sure to read up on any issues identified in the VMWare Knowledge Base. It turns out that there were a couple of issues discovered in some of the beta versions, and most seem to have been addressed. KB 5805328 has some advice that I had to follow to get RC1 to install, that also worked for Didier.

After the install was complete, things were up and running for the most part. However, I was having a problem at shut down...whenever I tried to shut down cleanly, I'd get a BSOD referring to BUGCODE_USB_DRIVER, and then a restart. Hhhhmmm...not a good way to go. I got in touch with Robert Hensing, and he suggested that I install the MS debugging tools and analyze the minidumps (by default, Vista creates minidumps during a BSOD) to see what happened. MS hasn't received many messages about the issue I was having, so there was no update available.

I got the tools installed, but to view the dumps, you have to launch both Windows Explorer and WinDbg using the right-click -> "Run as Administrator" functionality, due to the permissions set on the files, and the user access control (UAC) put in place on Vista. What a pain! Every atomic action you do requires additional privileges, and if you have to do something with more than one step in it (such as open a file in a debugger), then you're going to have problems when you try to figure some of this stuff out on your own.

Anyway, it came down to the usbhub.sys driver as what was causing the problem. I shut down the VM, removed the "USB Controller" from the VM profile, and restarted. Since then, I've had clean shut downs.

So far, so good...