It was the scanner, in the living room, with the driver!

</cluedo>

I was finally fed up enough this morning to let my laptop complete dumping memory when it blue-screened yet again about a minute after I logged into my laptop. 1 gigabyte of dump file and a reboot into Safe Mode later...

( The culprit is identified in gory detail! )

The solution was as simple as running this command in an elevated Command Prompt (while in Safe Mode) and then rebooting:

C:\Windows>sc config ubhelper start= disabled
[SC] ChangeServiceConfig SUCCESS

I can add my voice to itsacz's criticisms of Creative hardware, and in addition, criticize Mustek for writing bad drivers. It's somewhat frustrating that it took so long for these bugs to be exposed when everything appeared stable on XP and below...

Now that everything's stable, the laptop actually runs quite a bit faster than it used to, and I was able to go online from a food court in Tiong Bahru (where I went with wao while accompanying her on her photo-taking adventures) during lunch using the new Wireless@SG initiative from the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore. The speed is actually quite good, even at 12:30 pm on a Wednesday afternoon. :)

And yes, I believe I still have a Cluedo set at home somewhere. ^_^