Vista Keyboard & Mouse Freeze immediately on boot

I've got a major problem on my home machine ...

(Vista Home Basic, 32 Bit, 3.2GHz Celeron, 2G Memory, 80G disk, 16G Free,
MicroInnovations wireless Mouse, std Keybd, running NAV 2010)
No new software or hardware additions in the last month.

I re-booted after MS latest flurry of updates and it seemed to come up OK
but BOTH the mouse and keyboard were frozen. No reponse whatsoever
although I can see the desktop fine and the machine seems to be running.
I determined this by trying to plug in a USB keyboard & mouse. Upon doing this,
Vista beeped and recognized them & installed drivers, but they too were frozen.

Thinking this could be a virus or malware problem, I tried booting to the NAV disk
to try and scan, but instead of booting, I got a BSOD complaining about the file:
rdacdisk.sys & the error that it unloaded with pending operations.

Since the machine is a Fry's OEM box, it didn't come with a repair CD,
so I grabbed a spare disk & reloaded virgin vista to it.

It booted fine & that's what I'm running on now.
My original system disk looks fine.
I then made a repair CD from the torrent file at neosmart.com.
It too found no problems on my original system disk.
The disk I used to reload vista is actually too small to load NAV,
so I'm going to have to dig up something bigger if I want to scan it.
Or move it to another system with NAV.

Does any of this sound familiar or match a known problem ?

TIA.

PS. I just realized that my above description was inaccurate.
When I plugged in the USB keyboard & mouse, things remained frozen
because the OS popped up a box prompting me to install the drivers
for the new devices. Without a keyboard or mouse, I couldn't tell
it to proceed.

Also, I'm guessing that the described NAV problem was a result of a
bad stick of memory which I discovered and replaced afterwards (see below).

Hi again-

It seems no one has any ideas, so here's some more info.

In the process of reloading Vista to a new disk I found that one of my
memory sticks had gone bad so I've replaced it. That still didn't
fix the freezing problem, so let's assume that one or more of the
OS files has been corrupted as a result. Since I don't know how many
other files might be corrupted, the safe thing to do would be to start
over from scratch. But I've got so many apps installed on the old system
that I'd like to try and resurrect it, at least for a while.

I did a binary level file compare on the system32/driver directory between
the old & new installs and while there seemed to be changes in a bunch of
the subdirectories, apart from added drivers from things I'd previously installed
in the old directory, files like kbdclass.sys, mouclass.sys & i8042prt.sys were
the same.

I then rebooted and enabled boot logging on both the old & new OS's and
after a file compare, found that in the old, problem boot, the kbdclass.sys
file is never loaded. I'm guessing this is the root of my problem.

The question now is that since the actual file is not corrupted, which
other file is the one that actually loads or has a list of drivers that are to be
loaded during boot ? I need a very basic flowchart of Vista's normal
boot procedure & the files that are accessed.

My google searches are not being particularly useful (yet).

Thanks again,
-brad a.

Welcome.

Type cmd in search

Do not hit enter

right click on cmd and then run as administrator

In cmd type sfc /scannow. Run it 3 times if errors are found.

It that does not correct the problem, type event viewer in search after the problem and look for errors

Check all driver via device manager. Make sure that there are no yellow warining stickers in device manager, indicating a problem

Go to search type memory diagnostics and run over night and look for problems

Thanks Richard for the advice.

Unfortunately after I ran sfc (using the offbootdir & offwindir options since I have no
keyboard or mouse control when booting to the disk with the problem OS) the result
was no integrity violations. Which I suppose is good as it says that I don't have any
major corruption, probably just one file or one piece of data that's out of wack.

Also, after finding my bad stick of memory, I ran full memory diagnostics on the
replacement SIMMs and they came back clean.

Finally, I don't have the option of looking at the device manager or event viewer after
booting the problem OS as I have no control of the keyboard or mouse.

Oh yeah, and in an attempt to fool the bad OS into loading the missing keyboard driver,
I copied the kbdclass.sys over a couple of other drivers (each during different boots)
that were getting loaded but likely wouldn't interfere with basic OS operation if they
were missing (serial.sys & a Norton .sys file). During boot, it appeared that the
replacement drivers loaded but everything was still frozen.

Any other thoughts ?

Thanks anyway.

Try a clean boot and see if it works.

How to troubleshoot a problem by performing a clean boot in Windows Vista or in Windows 7


Just realized you may have problems with this method, due to keyboard problem.

Im going for my daily walk, I will think about this, and report back any new remedies.