Blue Screen Of Death: 0x0000007E

Something happened the other day and I was quite surprised by it. I hadn't really noticed how long it had been since I'd experienced a BSOD until there it was, staring me in the face.
0x0000007E (SYSTEM_THREAD_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED).
I wasn't doing anything special - the system wasn't starting up or shutting down, and I wasn't using any exotic hardware or software. Just a flash of the screen, and then FLOOP! BSOD.

I let KeBugCheckEx write out the kernel memory dump, and rebooted. SaveDump did its thing and I tossed Memory.DMP into WinDbg. I'm not very proficient with WinDbg, but WinDbg makes analyzing most crash dumps (that I've run across, at least) rather trivial.

!analyze -v

That's all you need to know.

For my BSOD, WinDbg told me that the likely culprit was HCMON.SYS, which (indirectly) caused an access violation (0xc0000005) when an attempt was made to write to 0x2dc22865.

A search of %windir%\system32\drivers shows that HCMON.SYS is a component of VMware Workstation (and likely VMware Player, and...). The Version Resource of HCMON.SYS indicates that it is the "VMware USB monitor". Of course, I had recently upgraded to VMware Workstation 5.5.2, which was released on 2006-08-10. The timestamp on HCMON.SYS was 2006-08-04.

I don't know if a problem was introduced in the new version of VMware Workstation, or if the fact that a VMware component was implicated in a BSOD that took place shortly after the component was upgraded is merely a coincidence, but it sure is nice to be able to identify the source of the BSOD. If it continues to be a problem, I know where to go...