I've done roughly 100 encodes from DVD to Divx/Xvid, so I know what to actually do. Trouble is I upgraded from my tried-and-true KT7-RAID with SDRAM (512MB) & a 1.2GHz Athlon to a new Gigabyte GA-7N400Pro2 (nForce2; 400Mhz bus) Athlon XP 3000+/400 (2.1GHz), and 2x256MB DDR PC-3200 (I have never used DDR before, let alone this dual channel I have now). Also, bear in mind that I have built many a PC, it is just that they have not used DDR RAM, but that shouldn't matter, now should it?

Anyways, whenever I go to encode a ripped DVD (I rip to M2V + AC3 directly) like I usually do (with DVD2AVI+AVISynth+Virtualdub or just Virtualdub-MPEG2) I get a blue screen. It isn't immediate, but rather ~10 minutes into the 1st pass. I don't believe it to be heat-related, since it will peak at about 54C CPU & 34C case (yes, I do think the case is hot, but it is quiet and that's what I prefer to a loud cold beast...I used a black delta 7000rpm for 1.5 years, and I don't like that noise :) ).

When I get the blue screen (running XP Home, and I've tried encodes on Win2K, XP Home, XP Home SP1, and XP Home SP2 beta v2149 [from MS site]), and it is almost always the win32k.sys file that is at fault. The error message is a IRQL_LESS_NOT_EQUAL error. Sometimes however, it is rtlnic51.sys, which is my on-board gigabit network driver.

Any thoughts? Why the heck would my NIC driver have anything to do with this? Could it be RAM-related? I've tried running memtest86 extended and it comes back without errors after hours of testing. I've tried it with just a single DIMM a while back, but the same thing happened.

This is the *ONLY* time it will crash. I can do anything else, including hours of gaming, and it won't do anything, even if I don't restart for days. But as soon as I want to encode something, it crashes.