They could be any of those.<p>In a sense, BSODs aren&#x27;t anything special -- all a BSOD means is that some code running in kernel mode has crashed or raised some exception that went unhandled.  The same thing, when it happens in a user-mode program, gets you the error dialog box &#x27;Program has stopped working&#x27;.<p>So the causes of BSODs and user application crashes are the same.  The reason Windows has BSODs is that it&#x27;s dangerous to keep the system going when something in kernel mode crashes.  Things running in kernel mode have access to everything (think - all memory) and are deemed important enough to the operation of the whole system that a crash in one of those is a significant event that&#x27;s worthy of special logging and rebooting.  You can&#x27;t guarantee, for example, that a display driver crash hasn&#x27;t corrupted other parts of memory, cuasing potential for data loss if the system were to continue operating.<p>So, back to the original point.  Device-driver BSODs from the big vendors are probably rare enough in general that you should suspect a hardware problem or glitch if you suddenly see one out of the blue.  Graphics drivers, given their complexity, are a bit more prone to crashing though.  Also, things running on the system can interact and cause the driver to crash.<p>Windows has lots of infrastructure in place for making sure device drivers behave safely.  There&#x27;s also good facilities for figuring out exactly what caused a BSOD beyond the usually cryptic-looking error code you see on the screen.<p>Resplendence WhoCrashed is handy:
<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.resplendence.com&#x2F;whocrashed" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.resplendence.com&#x2F;whocrashed</a><p>Though if you really want to dig deep, the tools with the Windows SDK (particularly WinDbg) can let you achieve the same thing; they are developer tools though, so targeted more to that audience.<p>EDIT: Just to add in answer to your original comment, big-vendor graphics drivers are VERY often updated.  I&#x27;d bet they&#x27;re the most often updated drivers on a system.  There are myriad reasons for this, both technical and competitive.  That doesn&#x27;t mean that long-standing problems are necessarily fixed, but both AMD and Nvidia have very regular releases with fixes and performance improvements.