Can heat cause a BSOD and memory dump?

My laptop, MSI, has been acting funny lately, coming up with an error everytime I started it up (msvcr71.dll missing or damaged was the error IIRC).

I was concerned that it was malware (even though my laptop is the BEST protected of my three because that's the one I surf with). So, I decided to do a recovery.

I did one recovery, started reinstalling my software, and the msvcr71 error returned. So, since I did that recovery only on the OS partition, I did another recovery on the full disk.

So I did two recoverires within an hour of each other. After the second was completed and I had installed my internet security software (my first installation), I got the BSOD with the error message in the title (IRQ LESS THAN OR EQUAL TO.... and if there was a figure after that I don't remember it, sorry).

So I restarted it, and almost immediately upon restart I got it again. So I let it sit for about 5 minutes, restarted it again, and I got it again, although this time it took about 10 minutes of using it.

So, I let it sit for several hours, restarted it, and I've been using it now for about an hour with no more BSOD. When I got the BSOD I will say I could tell the fans were blowing at full speed because they were loud.

So, do you guys think I'm ok and it was likely heat related or should I still worry??

Thanks again for any help.

In case it matters, MSI Notebook, Windows 7 Home Edition-64 bit. It's the MSI GT780DXR, with the Intel i7-2670QM processor, and Nvidia GTX 570M/3GB GDDR5 video card, DDR3 16GM RAM, two 750GB hard drives running in Raid 0. If any of that helps.

Short answer, yes.

Since it is a laptop, it wouldn't hurt to clean out the heatsinks and fans in it. Buy a can of compressed air, do a search on youtube on how to safely open up your laptop model and go wild.

A friend of mine asked me once how often you need to change air filters in a laptop. Since he is a pretty good car mechanic, I thought he was joking. It turned out that he had open up his laptop and found what he THOUGHT was a fiber air filter between the fan and the heatsinks. When dust, hairs and other lovely stuff is tightly compressed during a couple of years, it actually looks pretty much like a fiber filter.

Thank you. I'm thinking right now that it was heat. Or at least I'm hoping. But I've been using it for two hours now, and no problems, and I just restarted it three times just to make sure it wasn't something in the boot sequence that was causing it, and no more problems.

Now if I could just figure out what the hell was causing that msvcr71.dll error... lol.

I'm gonna install one program at a time, use for awhile, and hopefully if it returns this time I'll be able to narrow it down to a specific program.

Well, I found the culprit for the msvcr.dll error. And it was part of the Norton Security Package. It's something called Constant Guard, and it may be, although I'm not sure, unique to Comcast subscribers.

But as soon as I uninstalled that, the msvcf.dll errors ended.

Constant Guard is a suite of programs, one of which is Norton Security Suite for AV and anti-Malware purposes), along with Identity Theft Protection, and some others. So I'm thinking I'm still protected because even though I uninstalled Constant Guard, Norton Security Suite is still installed and running properly (I checked).

Posting this on the 1% another Comcast subscriber using Constant Guard gets msvcr71.dll missing errors sees this. It appears Constant Guard is the culprit.