Scott Gammans's furious key-hammering produced this:
> Yesterday my laptop started rebooting itself as soon as I open POV-Ray 3.5.
> I'll get as far as the splash screen and then suddenly I see a black screen
> as the laptop restarts itself.

Weird.  Does the screen look like it might be flashing blue for a fraction of
a second?  It sounds like a driver problem (resulting in a blue screen) of death
to me.

Try this: right-click "My Computer" and select "Properties".  Click on the
"Advanced" tab of the dialog box that comes up and click on the "Settings"
button near "Startup and Recovery".  Under the "System Failure" frame, ensure
that "automatically restart" is turned off.  If it was on, click "ok" on both
dialogs and try starting POV-Ray.  If you get a blue screen with debugging
information, write down the error codes and any other information that could
pin-point what driver is failing (probably a driver with a .drv or .sys
extension such as "nv4disp.drv").  Most of the numbers are meaningless to many
of the people here so you shouldn't have to include them.

On the other hand, if the option was off in the first place, leave it off,
cancel out of both dialogs, but don't start POV-Ray.

-- 
/*^*/light_source{100*<-5,2,-5>2}#macro I(i,n)#while(strlen(i)>=n)#local A=asc(
substr(i,n,1));#local a=asc(substr(i,n+1,1));cylinder{<div(A,8)-12,mod(A,8)-4,4
><div(a,8)-12,mod(a,8)-4,4>,0.1pigment{rgb z}}#local n=n+2;#end#end I("ScUe[]"1
/*<*/)I("mkmtlttk"1)//@_$#!,:<"Thhis polysig brought to you by Ian Burgmyer :)"

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Ian:

OK, this is really weird. I went to the Windows 2000 event log and saw a
bunch of errors that read something like "Windows 2000 has rebooted because
of a bugcheck." I also noticed that the system log was VERY large, and I
seem to recall that Windows get flaky when the event log gets to be of
considerable size. Unfortunately, I was a bit hasty with my mouseclicks and
I didn't save the event log before emptying it. And now I can't seem to get
POV-Ray to crash Windows... whether I have "Automatically reboot" checked or
not.

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Rick:

For some reason I wasn't able to get that tab to come up on the display
properties dialog box until I cleared out the Windows event log (see my
reply below to Ian Burgmyer). Whenever I clicked on that tab, the Display
Properties dialog box would hang and I'd have to close it through Task
Manager.

Now that I've emptied the event log, though, not only can I access that tab,
but it doesn't seem to have any effect--I can't get POV-Ray to crash Windows
no matter what I try to do with hardware acceleration. Very strange.

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Scott Gammans's furious key-hammering produced this:
> OK, this is really weird. I went to the Windows 2000 event log and saw a
> bunch of errors that read something like "Windows 2000 has rebooted because
> of a bugcheck."

Bugcheck?  Heh, I don't think I've ever seen that before.

> I also noticed that the system log was VERY large, and I
> seem to recall that Windows get flaky when the event log gets to be of
> considerable size.

The event log should have a size limit imposed on it (it does on XP, at least).
Try right-clicking on the particular log and clicking "properties".  Mine are
all set to 512KB (the default for XP) and I haven't had any problems with it.

> And now I can't seem to get
> POV-Ray to crash Windows... whether I have "Automatically reboot" checked or
> not.

How is that a bad thing? ;)

-- 
/*^*/light_source{100*<-5,2,-5>2}#macro I(i,n)#while(strlen(i)>=n)#local A=asc(
substr(i,n,1));#local a=asc(substr(i,n+1,1));cylinder{<div(A,8)-12,mod(A,8)-4,4
><div(a,8)-12,mod(a,8)-4,4>,0.1pigment{rgb z}}#local n=n+2;#end#end I("ScUe[]"1
/*<*/)I("mkmtlttk"1)//@_$#!,:<"Thhis polysig brought to you by Ian Burgmyer :)"

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"Ian J. Burgmyer" <the### [at] maccom> wrote in message
news:3e6af34c@news.povray.org...

> > And now I can't seem to get
> > POV-Ray to crash Windows... whether I have "Automatically reboot"
checked or
> > not.
>
> How is that a bad thing? ;)
Eh... only a bad thing in that I now hold my breath every time I start
POV-Ray, not knowing whether or not Windows might decide to BSD all over me.
:p

But thanks anyway!

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"Scott Gammans" <nos### [at] scottgammansspamisevilcom> wrote in
news:3e6cd534$1@news.povray.org: 

> 
> "Ian J. Burgmyer" <the### [at] maccom> wrote in message
> news:3e6af34c@news.povray.org...
> 
>> > And now I can't seem to get
>> > POV-Ray to crash Windows... whether I have "Automatically reboot"
> checked or
>> > not.
>>
>> How is that a bad thing? ;)
> Eh... only a bad thing in that I now hold my breath every time I start
> POV-Ray, not knowing whether or not Windows might decide to BSD all
> over me. 
>:p
> 
> But thanks anyway!
> 
> 
> 

Is your event log set to overwrite events older than seven days?

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Scott Gammans's furious key-hammering produced this:
>>> And now I can't seem to get
>>> POV-Ray to crash Windows... whether I have "Automatically reboot"
>>> checked or not.
>>
>> How is that a bad thing? ;)
> 
> Eh... only a bad thing in that I now hold my breath every time I start
> POV-Ray, not knowing whether or not Windows might decide to BSD all over me.
> :p

Heh, I see your point.

Well, you just *know* that Windows is going to wait until you're comfortable
with starting up POV-Ray and then it's going to start BSOD'ing again. ;)

-- 
/*^*/light_source{100*<-5,2,-5>2}#macro I(i,n)#while(strlen(i)>=n)#local A=asc(
substr(i,n,1));#local a=asc(substr(i,n+1,1));cylinder{<div(A,8)-12,mod(A,8)-4,4
><div(a,8)-12,mod(a,8)-4,4>,0.1pigment{rgb z}}#local n=n+2;#end#end I("ScUe[]"1
/*<*/)I("mkmtlttk"1)//@_$#!,:<"Thhis polysig brought to you by Ian Burgmyer :)"

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"Tom Galvin" <tom### [at] imporg> wrote in message
news:Xns### [at] 204213191226...
> Is your event log set to overwrite events older than seven days?

Tom:

All three logs (application, system and security) are set to overwrite
events > 7 days old.

--sg

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"Scott Gammans" <nos### [at] scottgammansspamisevilcom> wrote in 
news:3e76414a@news.povray.org:


> All three logs (application, system and security) are set to overwrite
> events > 7 days old.
> 
> --sg
> 
> 
> 

If the log fills up and the oldest event is less than seven days old, it 
can sometimes hose windows.  With the logevent utility from the resource 
kit you can fill the event log up and see if that was the issue.

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That jibes with what I remember about a similar problem I experienced a few
years ago. I'll try and find a copy of the Windows Resource Kit and see if
that's the cause (I tried finding logevent on MSDN without success)...
Thanks Tom!

"Tom Galvin" <tom### [at] imporg> wrote in message
news:Xns### [at] 204213191226...
> "Scott Gammans" <nos### [at] scottgammansspamisevilcom> wrote in
> news:3e76414a@news.povray.org:
>
>
> > All three logs (application, system and security) are set to overwrite
> > events > 7 days old.
> >
> > --sg
> >
> >
> >
>
> If the log fills up and the oldest event is less than seven days old, it
> can sometimes hose windows.  With the logevent utility from the resource
> kit you can fill the event log up and see if that was the issue.

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