Fixing Frequent Windows Crashes: A WAN Miniport (PPPOE) Story

My Windows machine (HP OMEN Max) had been crashing frequently — sometimes the Wi-Fi icon would just disappear before the whole thing went down with a BSOD.

Finding the culprit

Windows saves a crash dump every time it blue-screens, in C:\Windows\Minidump\. To read them I used WinDbg (free, on the Microsoft Store). Open the .dmp file, run !analyze -v, and it names the culprit:

FAILURE_BUCKET_ID:  0x9F_4_raspppoe!RasPppoeCleanup
IMAGE_NAME:         raspppoe.sys

A few things to decode here:

• 0x9F is the DRIVER_POWER_STATE_FAILURE bugcheck — a driver failed to complete a power transition (sleep, resume, shutdown) in time.
• raspppoe.sys is the driver behind WAN Miniport (PPPOE).

So the PPPoE driver was hanging during power transitions and taking the system down with it. That also explains the Wi-Fi icon vanishing right before the crash — the network stack was wedged.

The fix

Device Manager → Network adapters → WAN Miniport (PPPOE) → Disable device.

PPPoE is not critical infra — it’s only used for old-school DSL broadband dial-in, where you enter an ISP username and password to connect. I don’t use that. Wi-Fi, Ethernet, and VPNs are unaffected by disabling it.

No crashes since. If something breaks in the future, I’ll just re-enable it.

Takeaway

If Windows is crashing and you don’t know why, don’t guess — the minidumps in C:\Windows\Minidump\ plus WinDbg’s !analyze -v will usually point straight at the offending driver.