Today i had an issue where a workstation running XP Home edition would BSOD when you logged in.  The BSOD occured sometime while loading the tray icons – normally.  After a lot of troubleshooting (which basically just involved disabling services via msconfig until the problem went away) I figured out that the Plug and Play service was the culprit.

I checked the dependencies tab on the services properties to see what services depended on the Plug and Play service to start.  I then disabled all the services that were dependant upon the Plug and Play service and I enabled the Plug and Play service.  After a reboot, everything seemed to work fine.

I then started enabling the services which were dependant upon the Plug and Play service.  It turns out the Windows Audio service was the culprit.  I’m guessing that either a sfc /scannow or a remove and reinstall of the sound card drivers would have resolved the problem, but I didn’t get a chance to try because the client said, “Oh well, we don’t want sound on that computer anyway.”  He asked me to leave it as is, so that was that.

Hope this saves someone else some time!

Luke