Recent interesting solve - F4: CRITICAL_OBJECT_TERMINATION

I recently solved (well, the user recently solved!) a relatively easy F4 bugcheck. I always love when they're simple and only require an exchange of a few words! :')

Anyways, the user was having BSOD's of course. After taking a look at the dump attached to the post, it was an F4: CRITICAL_OBJECT_TERMINATION bugcheck. I informed the user that F4's essentially mean that there's a hardware problem with the boot drive, or a device driver has a bug or a critical service was stopped.

The user mentioned that they cannot boot into safe mode, so I figured one of two things given the info provided and the bugcheck:

1.Dying drive.

2. Software issue preventing safe mode from booting properly.

I recommended the user to try and run a repair if the OS disc was available at hand. Thankfully, the user was able to perform a restoration to the same day the BSOD happened. As it turns out, the issue ended up being a Microsoft Malicious Software patch. The user mentioned the system had Norton antivirus, so Norton may have blocked that patch somehow and interfered which then caused a bit of trouble in Windows.

After the using system restored before the patch, the system worked fine.