No dice
So I got home and immediately installed the Vista Update. The first update that I tried KB938979 actually hung and the Vista dialog came up stating the application error and do I want to close or look online for solutions…this gave me a really good feeling. Anyway that wasn’t the one I was really excited about anyway. I quickly made sure I had the most up to date drivers from nVidia and then installed KB938194. It called for a reboot, which I did. I then went into my favorite game and gave it a try. To my utter disappointment, I still had the same problem. To be fair, the problem wasn’t as bad. Instead of blacking out the screen and disabling playing time for 30 seconds it only stopped play time for about 5 seconds and the screen would just flicker. It also didn’t happen as often as it used to. Used to be every 2-3 minutes like clockwork, now I was going a good 10 minutes in between time, although when it happened, it would occur 3-4 times straight. So hopefully as newer drivers are available and SP1 comes out this will work itself out….
If anyone has any other ideas of what to try, I’m open to suggestions…here’s the hardware I’m running:
- Case – COOLER MASTER Centurion RC-534-SKR5 Silver Aluminum & Mesh bezel, SECC chassis ATX Mid Tower Computer Case 430W Power Supply
- Motherboard – ASUS M2N-SLI Deluxe Socket AM2 NVIDIA nForce 570 SLI MCP ATX AMD Motherboard
- CPU – AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ Windsor 2.0GHz Socket AM2 Processor
- Hard Drive – Western Digital Raptor WD740ADFD 74GB 10,000 RPM Serial ATA150 Hard Drive x2
- Memory – CORSAIR XMS2 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) x2
- Video Card – EVGA 256-P2-N554-AX GeForce 7600GT 256MB GDDR3 PCI Express x16 Video Card
- Sound Card – Creative 70SB046A00000 7.1 Channels PCI Interface Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeGamer Fatal1ty Professional Series
- DVD – LITE-ON 16X DVD±R DVD Burner With LightScribe and 5X DVD-RAM Write Black
- Monitor – Acer AL1916WAbd Black 19" 5ms DVI Widescreen LCD Monitor
I purchased the parts and built this as a Christmas gift last year for our family. Since then Scott Hanselman has been blogging about his experience purchasing and Jeff Atwood’s experience building a computer. I’m an avid reader of Scott’s blog and listener to his podcast. While he provides good content, I also relate since due to his experiences with black hair and type I diabetes. While I do not have diabetes, I’ve dealt with the effects all my life as both my father and late grandmother have type I, and my mother has type II (if you don’t know the difference, you can read at his blog here and here). As far as my experience with black hair, you can see my family pictures 
Yikes. What about trying to totally uninstall the NVidia drivers and use the standard out of the box NVidia ones that came with Vista?
Scott, I have tried the standard Microsoft drivers as well as different versions of the nVidia drivers (including the beta) prior to the patch. I’ve tried the current and the beta nVidia drivers with the patch. Honestly, I hadn’t thought about going back to the Microsoft ones. I will cross my fingers and give that a try tonight and post the results.
Nope, no luck. Installed the MS driver and I didn’t get the driver not responding error, but I did get very bad looking graphics as well as graphics just plain missing.
Oh, well I’ll keep dealing with it and hopefully it will be resolved soon.