Vista shares the majority of it's blue screen errors with it's predecessor, Windows XP. The root causes are often similar, though the specifics (especially with drivers) are dependent on which one you're using (i.e. XP drivers often conflict with Vista). They occur when an illegal or impossible operation is attempted. While a large number of these are generally searchable in the support.microsoft.com site, many are rather rare in previous versions and are just now becoming common in Vista. In cases where the STOP error code is difficult to find troubleshooting information on (or the error itself never appears), Microsoft support can sometimes analyze your kernel dump file to determine the cause of the problem. The minidump version of this file is created by default in Vista.

This section contains a listing of some of the codes and their causes/solutions if available. Some blue screens do not show a code, rather they are blank blue screens (if your PC isn't doing anything but rebooting see this page for instructions on viewing the error before the system restarts itself).