Known issues on staff PCs

A list of issues currently affecting staff PCs with available work-arounds and information on long-term solutions

Current known issues are listed below. Each issue describes the symptoms you may be experiencing, any work-arounds that have been identified, and information on progress to resolve this issue.

In addition to the issues shown here, we have a number of troubleshooters covering other issues that you can resolve yourself.

If you are experiencing a problem that is not covered by any of these pages then please report this to us so we can investigate and assist you. Please include a description of the symptoms, what you were doing at the time, and the asset number of the PC affected.

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Applies to: managed staff laptops. This has not been seen on managed staff desktops.

Symptoms

Laptop crashes with a blue screen showing an error message "DRIVER IRQ NOT LESS THAN OR EQUAL" in relation to file NETIO.SYS.

Work-around

Restart the laptop. If you use the Firefox browser then update it to the latest version (Menu > Help > About Firefox should show at least version 105.0.1).

Desktop PCs are not believed to be affected so moving to a desktop temporarily could help in persistent cases.

Root cause and fix

This is believed to be caused by a bad interaction between Firefox and Sophos antivirus. Updates for both packages have been deployed to managed staff PCs that were affected.

Status

 Closed. (Updated 09/12/2022)

Applies to: staff laptops. This has not been seen on staff desktops.

Symptoms

Failure when connecting to VPN from the Windows sign-in screen. This usually looks like a long pause after selecting CONNECT, and then the VPN connection dialog appears again.

Work-around

Connecting to VPN a second time is normally successful.

Root cause and fix

This is believed to be caused by parts of the Windows networking system not being ready this early in the start-up process. We are investigating alternative solutions to resolve this.

Status

 Work-around available. (Updated 29/11/2022)

Applies to: all Windows PC using ODBC SQL server connections.

Symptoms

Failure when using pre-configured and new ODBC connections to SQL server data sources. Common error messages are:

  • The EMS System encountered a problem
  • [Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver] Protocol error in TDS Stream
  • [Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver]Unknown token received from SQL Server

Work-around

There is currently no work-around available.

Root cause and fix

Microsoft have identified this as a fault introduced with a recent security fix KB5019980 (source). They expect to release a fix in the next week or so.

Status

 Waiting for fix. (Updated 09/12/2022)

Status will progress as follows:

Icon Status Meaning
  Investigating An issue has been reported and confirmed as affecting users across the platform for an extended period of time. We are actively diagnosing the issue, and a work-around may be available.
  Work‑around A work-around for the issue has been identified. We are still working on a long-term resolution.
  Monitoring Changes have been made to resolve the issue and we are now monitoring system performance, checking that existing impact is resolved, and that there are no further instances of the issue.
  Closed Monitoring indicated that the issue is fully resolved. No further work is planned.

 

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