dell vostro 1710 and speedfan = SEVERE CRASH (BSOD-bad_pool_header+Can cause Windows To Not Load)!

I wanted some SMART data, so I ran speedfan (little did I know what'd happen next!).

Speedfan crashed Windows gave a BSOD about a bad_pool_header
error codes:
x(however many zero's)19
x(however many zero's)20
... (didn't write down the codes after that)

It's my friend's laptop, he gets exactly the same problem as this guy BSOD bad_pool_header - Laptops - Windows XP and this guy has a dell vostro 1510 (my friend's laptop which is 1710). (except that guy has slightly different codes after the 0x....20, i'm not sure if those codes after the 0x...20 change each time anyway)

It happens every time I start speedfan. Sometimes i'm finding I can't even get into windows after that and then the startup repair can't fix it and, it says bugcheck [something]..

when speedfan crashed I think it might've said something about NVIDIA..

even straight after doing a factory restore as in F8 and choosing dell image. I still get the error. Upgrading it to vista sp2, still get the error.

the minidump would take forever to upload but I ran (I think it was) kd -z on it and it mentioned iastor.sys (one person thought it's an intel driver to do with RAID , one person suggested uninstalling it, another said that even if one doesn't have or use RAID it still has the controller there so it shouldn't be uninstalled. I looked to update it on the intel site but it didn't mention it.. I found an iastor.sys file online and it checked ok in virustotal, but I didn't bother trying to replace my one with that 'cos a)maybe that wasn't the problem and b)I couldn't be bothered, I know if I try to delete the file it will probably say access denied and if I got past that it'd try to copy it from some kind of system files cache.. and i'd have to stop that happening. One person mentioned in device manager storage controllers seeing which one had iastor.sys and that it might be something like intel mass storage, but I saw nothing there like that or with iastor.sys (though it's possible that isn't even the issue).

this link
0002070: Blue screen when launching SpeedFan - Almico's Bug Tracker
mentions speedfan crashing with a BSOD on initialization and that thread mentions iastor.sys

those guys (almico) make speedfan and they haven't solved that bug

I ran the windows memory diagnostic tool and it didn't find any issue with memory.

I ran chkdsk on the hard disk and no issue there.

Initially it was just the BSOD but windows was still able to load.

Recently though I tried it and windows wouldn't load, it may be that can happen after factory defaults as well.

uploading a minidump(200-300MB) would take a while and I have my doubts about this one getting solved. So this is largely as a heads up to consider not running speedfan on that laptop or similar ones!