As earlier suggested by Prevx in the fix for Black Screen of Death (BSoD), the actual reason was not related to a recent update pushed by Microsoft.

Prevx has now apologized to Microsoft and also blogged about the Root cause of the Black Screen of Death. Here are some snippets from the blog post.

The issue appears to be related to a characteristic of the Windows Registry related to the storage of string data. In parsing the Shell value in the registry, Windows requires a null terminated "REG_SZ" string. However, if malware or indeed any other program modifies the shell entry to not include null terminating characters, the shell will no longer load properly, resulting in the infamous Black Screen with the PC showing only the My Computer folder.

This was the root cause that was causing the problem, which was earlier discovered by the SysInternals team a few years ago. They also said that they tested out the problem with the most recent Windows update.

Having narrowed down a specific trigger for this condition we’ve done quite a bit of testing and re-testing on the recent Windows patches including KB976098 and KB915597 as referred to in our previous blog. Since more specifically narrowing down the cause we have been able to exonerate these patches from being a contributory factor.

So the Black Screen of Death is NOT caused by Windows update, but is caused by some sort of malware or application which caused the above problem to trigger.

Sometime back we had introduced you to some funny and interesting 404 errors. Well how can we leave Windows behind, over the past years users have seen several errors which are funny and stupid and we couldn’t help but laugh at them.

Here are some funny Windows errors which we received via a email from a friend, hope you enjoy it and start your weekend with a bang.

End of the Internet as we see it

We were successful in screwing up your computer

We are watching serial keyleers

Free space needed to delete files

Give us a break, we need some fresh air too

We want you to understand and agree to gibberish

Mouse has gone shopping

We give you complete guarantee that we will screw you up

We don’t like you please go away

Feel free to share your own error messages from Windows. Have a great weekend and don’t forget to keep tuning back for more.

Every application you use may at one point or another crash or cease running, in most of the cases the applications show  you error messages in a alert using which you can Google or contact the support staff of the application.

For many years we have painfully typed each of the word in the error message in order to be able to Google it and find a solution.

Well not any more we came across a useful trick that will allow you to copy paste the error messages to a text editor without having to type it all.

To use the trick you need to simply need to copy the text from the active alert window using the hotkey Ctrl + C and then paste it to any text editor of your choice using the hotkey Ctrl + V.

Hope this trick will save you lots of time and efforts. Thanks CompuWorld.