BSOD adventure - probably caused by OC

First off, the story begins with this reddit post here.

I was getting PAGE FAULT IN A NON-PAGED AREA BSODs at first. This seemed to suggest I had a problem with my RAM or memory. Many Windows Memory Diagnostics and hours of running MemTest x86+ later, it found no problems with my two 4GB G-Skill Red sticks. I have since replaced these sticks with a pair of HyperX 8GB sticks, as it turns out I was using close to what was available of 8GB actually, without realising (a fuckton of tabs and addons in Firefox whilst running CSGO and a bunch of other programs does that apparently).

Before these errors, around August/September of last year let’s say, I overclocked my i5-4960k system from 3.4GHz to a (seemingly) stable 4.2GHz with a Cooler Master Nepton 240M Water cooler. Doing the job, CPU max goes 44 degrees.

Since replacing the RAM, and I think even before then, I got the occasional IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL BSOD, and it happened again today for the first time in a good while, randomly, during which my PC had been up for quite a while. So I decided to seriously sort it out once and for all.

This time, I had dump files to work with, as previously CCleaner had wiped them. So I booted up BlueScreenView to see that the crash address for this IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL was ntoskrnl.exe+14f4d0. After a quick google, I came across this and after a skim deciding to run the driver verifier, set the settings and restarted my PC.

It took an age to load up the sign-in screen and even longer to boot up and start start-up programs. Very unresponsive and slow. In the end I just decided to cold restart. I think it was on this next boot I went into the bios and decided to reduce the overclock from 4.2 to 4.1 and set the memory stability to from Normal to Extra Stability. (GIGABYTE GA Z97M–DS3H)

Then most of my start-up programs would not start and a pop-up saying: “The application was unable to start correctly (0xc0000005). Click OK to close the application.” came up for each. Restarted again. Set OC to 4.0, reset the memory stability, and underclocked the frequency to 1833MHz. Then appeared the new BSOD, DRIVER_VERIFIER_DETECTED_VIOLATION, every time I logged in and ran my start-up programs. On these start-ups, the login screen would take ages to appear again, logging in would take a while, but start-up would seem normal.

(Probably related!)

I decided to completely revert my OC to default settings, and started again. It was still a bit slow on boot, but not BSOD this time on logging in. I closed all unnecessary start-up programs just in case, and I think it’s because I stopped GIGABYTE’s OC Guru from starting, as the BlueScreenViewer report has the driver at fault as GPCIDrv64.sys. A quick search and that is identified as Gigabyte’s VGA Tools – Easy Boost, I assume something to do with overclocking the GPU (which I have done before in the past, but I am pretty sure I just have a stored profile for my GPU OC, the default profile is always loaded on boot).

Yep – I loaded the program up and I blue screened with DRIVER_VERIFIER_DETECTED_VIOLATION, back from that now.

So couple questions I have are:

1. Have I missed anything? What’s my next course of action?
2. Do I just simply now not use that program, uninstall it, remove the driver, or perhaps update it, see if it doesn’t cause me problems after?
3. Should I restore my OC after I clear this whole mess up? (Probably not right, since it's most likely the singular cause for all of this)

Attached are the dumps and screenshots.