7B Stop Root Causes

[White Haven]

This is not a thread requesting links to basic 'how to' fix articles.

I just wanted to get that out there before getting into the meat of things, because I want to keep the content focused. Over the past several years, I've seen more and more pieces of malicious software that either deliberately trigger a 0x7B stop error under certain circumstances (attempting to boot to safe mode, attempting to boot to an OS setup CD, etcetera), or as a side-effect of being fully or partially removed. 7B is one of those highly annoying stop codes that can refer to about a million different things, and as such is so vague as to be nigh-on useless.

What I'm trying to determine is the actual, underlying methods of triggering a 7B stop in the context of viruses. It's a long shot, but it would be highly spiffy to actually build up an understanding of how viruses are triggering these things, so that technicians (myself included) can actually know where to start looking when we run across them. Anyone with any relevant knowledge on the subject, by all means, jump in, let's see what we can come up with.

[Sarevok]

I do not have the knowledge to help. But I wish to ask something. Based on cursory googling this "0x7b" issue seems highly complex. Being able to reproduce it will require great deal of expertise in low level programming. Do YOU have what it takes ?

Apologies if I came off as too harsh but this really seems like one of those problems that would be best left to vendors themselves or uber l33t hackers. Not something that an average person would want to investigate and learn more about in their free time.

[Crayz9000]

The long and short of it, in my professional experience, has been that when a Windows system starts throwing random STOP errors whether due to malware or other means, it's typically more economical to install a clean copy of Windows than it is to attempt recovery of the broken installation.