Driver question

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Hi Guys,

XP machine randomly locks up. Doesn't always cause any logs in event viewer. Ran sigverif and it found 2 drivers that weren't signed.
I am convinced it is down to a piece of hardware which I am trialing to see if it is the culprit.
My question is with the device unpluged (USB) would the driver that is installed cause the system to hang? If the hardware was on it would be accessing the driver to communicate with the OS. I hope someone understands my poor explanation

 

Check if the system stabilises when in Safe Mode. That will certainly help to point up a driver issue.

 

Boyce I have an old USB network interface and it blue screens XP every now and again but when I stop the device and remove it the OS becomes stable again. From this I deduce the USB drivers are indeed unloaded when the thing is unplugged.

Pete

 

I've never been able to know for sure in Windows if drivers are loaded or not. In Linux however, it's possible. If I disconnect my usb printer, restart hotplug, and check the modules it loads(in Linux drivers are kernel modules), the usblp module isn't loaded into the kernel on the restart. When I plug the printer back in and restart hotplug the module is then loaded.

I know this is Linux and not Windows, but why would either system load drivers that are loaded dynamically when they are not being called, especailly at startup? As a computer basically searches itself for hardware at each boot why would it load a driver for hardware that it can't see? Doesn't make sense to me that it would.