Windows 7 Crashes Intermittently When Running Visual Studio 2010 SP1

It appears that some of the developers running Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 (SP1) on top of Windows 7 have been experiencing crashes of the operating system intermittently. One Microsoft employee confirmed the issue, and also provided a solution designed to help out those affected.

“We noticed from multiple customers’ environment that Windows 7 operating system intermittently crashes, while they working with Visual Studio 2010 [VS 2010],” revealed Microsoft’s Pradeep Kumar.

According to Kumar, there were quite a few VS developers affected by this problem, although the exact number wasn’t shared with the public.

“Windows 7 operating system crashes, while opening the multiple instances of Silverlight project through Visual Studio 2010 SP1 IDE. Troubleshoot this issue further; we have collected data from the machine, which crashed,” he added.

Kumar posted both the Windows Event Log [System Event Log] and the Kernel Memory dump information for other affected users to compare with their own data.

While there are no specific details related to the source of crashes, it appears that by simply updating the ‘igdkmd32.sys’ file, the problem goes away.

Kumar pointed customers that came across the issue described in this article to the Intel Driver Update Utility, a tool designed to automatically identify and find software updates.

This is not exactly an official fix from Microsoft, but rather the resolve that Kumar documented himself.

Still, there’s bound to be little harm in running the Intel Driver Update Utility, which is an official tool from the CPU maker.

“The Intel Driver Update Utility keeps your system up-to-date. It detects which driver updates are relevant to your computer, and then helps you install them quickly and easily,” reads an excerpt from the tool’s description. The Intel Driver Update Utility comes with support for Windows 7, as well as its predecessors, namely Windows Vista and Windows XP.

Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 (SP1) RTM ISO and Installer are available for download here.