April 6, 2002

Several Rawether users have reported problems using Rawether on Windows 98
SE under two fairly special situations:

Opening A Disabled Adapter
====================
An adapter is initially operational in the current hardware profile. The
Device Manager applet of the Control Panel is used to Disable the adapter in
the current hardware profile.

If W32N_OpenAdapter is used to attempt to open the disabled adapter, then a
fault or hand occurs.


Polling For Adapter Insertion
====================
Software that sees this problem is polling using W32N_OpenAdapter to detect
when a previously-installed adapter (e.g., Wireless PC Card) is re-inserted.

The problem is that when the PC Card is inserted there is a brief period of
time when 1.) NdisOpenAdapter succeeds but 2.) the miniport hardware
initialization is not actually complete. If the adapter handle returned
during this "window of vunerability" is used, then a fault or hang occurs.

More
===
Both of these faults happen when NdisOpenAdapter is successful, but the
adapter hardware is either not actually present or is not fully initialized.

A potential fix for this problem has been developed, and is available for
testing. The fix makes additional tests to determine the validity of the
NdisAdapterHandle before attempting to use it.

If you are a Rawether customer who is effected by this problem, please
download the candidate fix from:

IE Click: <ftp://ftp.pcausa.net/devonly/windis5/w98bugfix.zip>

FTP Url: <ftp.pcausa.net/devonly/windis5/w98bugfix.zip>

The fix consists of a modified PCANDIS3.VXD with version V5.01.13.51.

If you download and test this candidate fix, please let me know the results.

Regards,

Thomas F. Divine

PCAUSA - Toolkits & Resources For Network Software Developers
NDIS Protocol - NDIS Intermediate - TDI Client/Filter
<http://www.pcausa.com> - <http://www.rawether.net>