After rereading my post
here about buying the Hava device, I remembered that I never updated that post to reflect how I fixed Sabrina's PC lockup issue. Although I no longer have any of the crash dumps that happened while the Hava client was running on her computer, it seemed as though the system was crashing in the middle of processing a network packet. To go along with that theory, the network adapter in her older PC, a CNet Pro200WL, would stay 'lit up' on the physical interface lights on the card until the system was physically powered down. You could soft boot numerous times but the chip onboard would never recover from the crash. It was acting like a hardware bug or defect more than a driver problem.
Unfortunately, I think many of these cards at one time or another were bundled with Dell PCs because they were so low priced compared to quality chipsets. Her PC in question is a Dell PC that was donated to her by her grandparents not too long ago, much to her delight.
Running with that theory, and not wanting to have a kid constantly complaining about an unstable computer, I popped in my trusty SMC EtherPower, which is over a decade old. Not to be confused with the truly awful EtherPower 2, it is based on the excellent Digital DECchip 21140 (Tulip) chipset, which eventually was used as the "virtual chipset" that Virtual PC uses as an emulation platform for 10/100 ethernet.
Although it had higher latencies than some of the busmaster capable NICs that would come out after it, it was always a workhorse that had support in virtually every operating system. It has outlived a dozen of my personal PCs so far and was going to prove itself again in the year 2008.
Long story short: I put the old SMC network card in the 'practically new' PC and XP identified it correctly as an "Intel 21440 ethernet adapter". Intel bought the rights to Digital's network IP when Digital went out of business. I fired up the Hava client and no matter how many network packets I throw at the system, I can no longer blue screen the system once it starts seeing multicast/HAVA traffic.
Moral of the story: DEC chipset good,
Davicom chipset bad.
This hasn't been my first encounter with flaky behavior from a Davicom network card. I remember having nothing but trouble under Linux with the Davicom network adapter that was built into a MSI Book PC.
