I have been battling a BSOD, seemingly occurring randomly for months. It started last fall on my EVGA 790i mobo, and I was never able to solve it. I purchased all new components (except for RAM and video), fresh install of W7 x64, and the problem persisted. I RMA'ed every component in the system (even though they were all operating fine), as I was assured that the Stop 7F occurred due to a hardware issue. So after RMAing RAM, mobo, CPU, hard drives and video, the problem persisted. I even disconnected my DVDROMs completely. The Stop 7F blue screen does not reference any file as the culprit. Likewise my use of WinDBG (I'm a noob user) could not find any reference to anything but the kernel.
I got a suggestion to try uninstalling NIS 2010. I resisted initially, as I have 2 other systems here (both laptops) running the same OS and NIS 2010 and have never had an issue.
In an act of desperation, I completely removed NIS 2010, and this computer has been running perfectly fine for 3 days. Prior to removing NIS 2010, neither my old setup or my new one would run for a day without at least 1 (most often several) BSOD.
I know all of this seems crazy, but what are the odds that there is some conflict of some kind...obviously there is some issue, but what? The BSODs would happen randomly, but most often when the computer was completely idle (maybe a webpage displayed and my email running in the background) or during the use of Windows Explorer to browse for a file. The file browsing was the most common one I'd say. It would happen sometimes 4-5 times in a row when browsing files with Windows Explorer or trying to save a download to a particular folder.
Has anyone else seen anything like this? I have minidumps for Symantec support if they will help. For now, I'm fine, but I do feel a little more vulnerable without NIS - currently using Microsoft's free stuff until I get this resolved.
Thanks for your attention.