Driver Doldrums

Don’t you just hate it when you try to do the right thing and get a headache in return? On the heels of the battery recall saga comes a critical Broadcom WLAN driver vulnerability. My company’s fleet of Dell laptops, of course, was impacted by this security issue. We quickly did a sweep through our groups’ Latitude D410 and D610 laptops to update the Broadcom Wireless LAN drivers to the most current version, which supposedly addresses the vulnerability. For good measure, we also updated the Intel Wireless LAN drivers on our newer D620 and D420 laptops. For the most part, these updates went without incident.

Because we support a number of field sales personnel, we often have to wait for them to come in from the cold to perform significant updates and maintenance on their machines. I didn’t quite feel the compulsion to send CDs out and remote into machines to perform the updates. This week, I only had one in my “flock” that I hadn’t gotten to, and she was coming into the office for sales software training.

Dutifully, she dropped off her D410 laptop and said I could have it for the entire morning. I really only needed it for a half hour, or so I thought. After letting some Windows Updates get delivered to the laptop via WSUS, I rebooted the laptop and started the installer for the updated Broadcom WLAN drivers. That update went smoothly, so I rebooted again to do one final run-through. The laptop got to the Windows XP domain logon screen, and then promptly froze up solid. Whoa.

I made sure the D410 had the latest BIOS update, which it did… then I fell back on one of the oldest (and best) troubleshooting approaches, say it with me… “What was the last thing that changed?!” The Wireless LAN drivers, of course. I could boot the machine into safe mode OK, but not safe mode with networking (another clue). So I went into the laptop’s BIOS setup, and found the place to disable the Wireless LAN card at the hardware level. After I did that, the laptop booted up without a problem. Hmmmm. So I uninstalled the WLAN driver update, re-enabled the WLAN adapter in the BIOS and rebooted. Again, the machine booted up fine (albeit with no drivers set up on the Wireless LAN adapter).

I thought at first maybe something was corrupt with the driver package that I used. So I downloaded a fresh copy from the Dell support web site and re-installed. Again, the laptop froze up at the XP logon splash screen. Interestingly enough, I could actually see the little green “Wi-Fi” indicator light come on just as the machine froze. Yet another clue… clearly, this machine did not like these drivers. I double-checked that I had the correct type of drivers for the Dell Dual-Band 1470 Wireless LAN Mini-PCI adapter. I did.

I called Dell’s “Gold” (chuckle-chuckle) Tech Support, and after some back and forth, the support engineer wanted me to try the driver version (A09) just previous to the most recent one (A10). Problem was, I had to give the laptop back to the end user, and it would have taken me another 20 minutes to download this other driver (we have a very bandwidth challenged WAN connection). So I made a tactical decision to roll back to the original version of the WLAN driver that was installed on the laptop. That driver, vulnerability issues aside, worked fine.

I should have another opportunity to mess with this problem after the New Year. The odd part is, I’ve installed this driver on other D410 and D610 laptops with absolutely no problems. And the way we order our machines, they all have identical specs. My hunch is that the troublesome D410 has some slight difference with it’s Wireless LAN adapter, perhaps it’s an adapter meant for a different world region like Asia or Europe. They do have different driver packages depending on which region or country the machine was sold in.

In the end, cooler heads prevailed. I’m downloading all the different driver versions and variations at home so I can bring them in for further experimentation.

Onwards.

[tags]driver, update, wireless lan, adapter, D410, D610, WSUS[/tags]