I haven’t had a real nasty blue screen of death for the longest time – so I was long overdue.

During some housekeeping of my laptop I decided to get rid of some apps and then to my surprise I got a nice BSOD as a reward for cleaning out my harddisk.

I took me quite some time to get my head around this. Turned out, that one app was a little too eager to clean out stuff and removed some DLLs that where essentially needed by the logon-process.

Thank goodness I recently made a virtual image of my machine and still had an old copy of a BartPE image around. So just fire up BartPE, compare the contents of c:\windows\system32\ with the contents of my virtual image – and there were about a dozen DLLs missing.

A couple of hours later I had the missing DLLs back in place and … my machine is running again. I think this will put me advance for quite a while as far as BSOD are concerned.