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Wednesday, June 12, 2013

Issue with Surface Pro and Cisco Anyconnect 3.1.01065

So the issue is repeatable. Cisco Anyconnect VPN software appears to have serious issues with Surface Pro - to the tune of not being able to boot up after installation.

Steps to recreate:
  1. Install Cisco AnyConnect
  2. Reboot
Upon restart, you get the Surface "Diagnosing your PC" screen:



Followed by the dreaded "Automatic Repair" screen:


Using a known good version for Windows 8: anyconnect-win-3.1.01065-pre-deploy-k9

I get a dump after reboot and Windows 8 Pro on Surface Pro has to perform a system recovery.

I downloaded the Windows 8 SDK and did a dumpchk.exe:

BugCheck 7E, {ffffffffc0000005, fffff88003648a23, fffff880031fb1a8, fffff880031fa9e0}
This is an unhandled system thread exception. Dumpchk says the reason is the Cisco filter driver:

Probably caused by : acnamfd.sys ( acnamfd+8a23 )

ACNAMFD.SYS is the following:
Product: Cisco AnyConnect Network Access Manager

Company: Cisco Systems
Description: Cisco AnyConnect Network Access Manager Filter Driver

Working with Microsoft Support, and providing this info on my own, after an hour or so I was told that this is due to a limitation of Surface Pro hardware! Installed all of the latest firmware and drivers - again on my own - and no love. I thought that Surface Pro was the bees knees for road warriors!
What a major bummer. I can't use it for work - it is essentially an RT with bad battery life!

I will post if the story changes. I hope this helps anyone else experiencing the issue.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

exactly the same here!!!!!!!

Disgruntled Homeowner said...

Issue is resolved - new blog post with version needed!

Sj said...

Same here... I downloaded BlueScreenView and pointed the minidump file which highlighted acnamfd.sys+85dc and after some research I ended up on this blog. Thanks !! Surjeet Jubbal