Troubleshooting "General Protection Fault" (GPF) problems

Technical note:10104
Created:05/11/95 by Topher
Updated:07/07/95 by Brian
Operating system:Windows

Microsoft Windows can sometimes be prone to a wide variety of crashes,
glitches, GPF's, and other assorted weirdness.  Here's a list of
things to try if you're seeing those sorts of problems when you run
Netscape:
First, edit your NETSCAPE.INI file and change the "Use Asynch DNS"
line to "No".  This sometimes works magic in getting things to work,
since some configurations of Windows networking software will fall
over at the first sight of asynchronous DNS.  Also, if you do this,
make sure you set "Max Connections" to "1".  (Both of these settings
are in the "[Network]" section of the INI file.)
You should edit your CONFIG.SYS file to have:
  FILES=40        (or better)
  BUFFERS=40      (or 10 if you are using SMARTDRV disk caching)
  STACKS=9,256
  SHELL=C:\DOS\COMMAND.COM C:\DOS\ /P /E:2048
You might need to update the Windows video driver for your video card.
To test whether this is the case, change back to the Windows standard
VGA display mode (by running SETUP from the Windows directory and
changing the display option to VGA), then running Netscape for a while
to see if you still run into problems.  If the problem now goes away,
then contact your video card company for updates to your video driver
software.  Problems have definitely been seen with older Cirrus Logic
and ATI Mach 32 / Mach 64 video drivers.
Sometimes, conflicts can occur with programs that Windows loads when
it starts up.  Check the "LOAD=" and "RUN=" lines of your WIN.INI
file, and remove (or comment out) any of these lines which
automatically start up programs you don't really need to have running.
Do you have an antivirus program loaded in memory?  Sometimes these
programs will interfere with Netscape's operation, and cause crashes.
Sometimes, something you're loading in your CONFIG.SYS or AUTOEXEC.BAT
might interfere with the way that the Navigator works.  You might want
to try temporarily removing some of the things loaded in those files
to see if they might have caused the problems you were seeing.

Corporate Sales: 415/937-2555; Personal Sales: 415/937-3777; Federal Sales: 415/937-3678
If you have any questions, please visit Customer Service.

Copyright © 1996 Netscape Communications Corporation