I’m posting this here so I can find it again later, because this one caused a surplus of annoyance before I finally found a solution…

I have a Windows 7 x64 laptop which would randomly (once or twice a week) set the NTFS “dirty” bit on its C: drive, causing chkdsk to run at boot and find… well, no problem whatsoever. Sometimes this glitch would be heralded by a system tray / notification area message that the filesystem was allegedly corrupt, but often there would be no warning (aside from NTFS Event 55 messages in the system event log, or the output of

fsutil dirty query c:

if I bothered to run it manually), until chkdsk began its long run the next time I restarted the computer. Yeah, I know I could have used

chkntfs /x c:

to stop boot-time filesystem checks altogether, but then if there actually were a legitimate problem one day… :)

Anyway, after a couple months of this I finally hit upon this discussion on Microsoft TechNet, which in turn led me to KB 982927, including a hotfix (Fix316593). Microsoft makes you jump through some hoops to get the hotfix (you have to do an email confirmation thing and then even the download is password protected — why?), but after a month and a half I can say this has completely resolved the problem for me with no ill effects.

Hopefully Microsoft will roll this into SP1, since this is a longstanding, seemingly widespread problem, but at least we have this in the meantime…