One possible cause of this error is a rootkit virus. I recently had a customer who had this error, along with other symptoms like a hijacked browser and a pop up window that would shut down the PC after about 5 – 10 minutes of use.

Malwarebyte’s Anti-Malware did not find any spyware, even after doing a full scan. I checked msconfig, regedit, and HijackThis — all turned up clean.

I decided to run ComboFix and it turned up a rootkit virus that had infected atapi.sys. Once Combofix disinfected the file the problems were resolved.

http://www.combofix.org/download.php