Do drivers load even when related program has not been started?

Still trying to fix my win10 that BsODs frequently.

It seems to me that programs installed recently are the most likely
problem, because of the drivers that come with the programs, which my
system had not seen before, but the 3 programs installed in the 3 months
before the BsOD problem started never get used (I used one or two of
them once and they worked that first time.) One is Zoom, one is some
special video player that seems related to some zoom-like setting, and
the other one is nothing special.

But if I don't start a program, could any bad drivers that came with it
still cause a problem? Are drivers loaded at a startup, or any other
time, even if the program isn't started?


Unfortunately Uninstall Program does not work in safe mode, but I think
I can get regular mode to work long enough to uninstall a few.

micky wrote:
Still trying to fix my win10 that BsODs frequently.

It seems to me that programs installed recently are the most likely
problem, because of the drivers that come with the programs, which my
system had not seen before, but the 3 programs installed in the 3 months
before the BsOD problem started never get used (I used one or two of
them once and they worked that first time.) One is Zoom, one is some
special video player that seems related to some zoom-like setting, and
the other one is nothing special.

But if I don't start a program, could any bad drivers that came with it
still cause a problem? Are drivers loaded at a startup, or any other
time, even if the program isn't started?


Unfortunately Uninstall Program does not work in safe mode, but I think
I can get regular mode to work long enough to uninstall a few.

Do you have any .dmp files in your minidump folder ?

The Windows Debugging Tools download I suggested in a
previous post, it has windbg.exe, but it also has
a tiny (21K) dumpchk.exe . And the dumpchk is supposed
to decode .dmp files.

Even the Reliability Monitor, if you hold your mouse over
an item that represents a crash, it may present a balloon
with the details of the crash. Roughly the equivalent of
what dumpchk holds.

https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/...dows-10-a.html

What I don't know, is if the 10.0.19041.1 version of dumpchk
is actually recompiled for the latest Windows 10. It seems
awfully small as Windows executables go. If I compile a
program myself, it might be 96KB. Dumpchk being 21K or 22K,
that's pretty small for a modern executable.

*******

Drivers load at the time the kernel loads.

In fast boot, the drivers are already loaded. An image
of the kernel and drivers is restored, and the drivers
are "warm started", to initialize the hardware registers
associated with them.

When your desktop appears after boot, all the drivers
should be loaded.

The driver has to initialize. It would define rings for
memory buffers perhaps. It isn't so passive that its
activities couldn't possibly have an effect.

What it shouldn't be doing, is running when nobody is
talking to it. A driver for a network device for example,
it has to listen to arriving packets (Interrupt from NIC
chip, service receive buffer ring), so it's not in
a position to "snooze" and be innocuous.

I would keep working on your "root cause", in the hopes
of identifying what needs to be uninstalled. Instead of
using the old "binary search" method (removing a bunch
of stuff, seeing if it behaves better, remove a bunch
more stuff and so on). Maybe a .dmp file admits to
what is broken.

Paul