Serious Head Scratcher

[ID10T16]

Ok, this problem kind of slowly creeped up on me seemingly from nowhere. Sunddenly, all my games produce a huge amount of artifacts. It looks alot like when Digital Cable or Satellite gets a mediocre signal & you get thos little blocks on random spots on the screen. Anywho, long story short...

Specs:

Video: ATI Radeon 9800 Pro Latest drivers as of 9/29/04
CPU: AMD Athlon XP 3000+ 333mhz
RAM: 768mb DDR PC 2700
Sound: SB LIVE MP3+ 5.1 Latest drivers as of 9/29/04
Mobo: Giga-byte GA-7VAX Latest drivers/bios as of 9/29/04
OS: WinXP Pro SP1 ( don't like SP2 yet, waitin for SP2a)
DirectX: DX9c
What I've tried so far...

1. Removed ALL drivers for Video card & Chipset Drivers for MB. Then ran registry cleaner. Reinstalled Chipset Drivers, rebooted. Reinstalled Video Card Drivers. No luck.

2. Same as above, except tried Vid Drivers first, then Chipset drivers. No luck.

3. Turned off all anti-virus & anti-spyware software. No luck.

4. Tried turning down acceleration. No luck.

5. Tried changing the DirectX refresh rate to be 60 like my monitor is set for. No luck.

6. Turned off write combining. No luck.

7. Turned back on write combining. No luck.

8. Dropped down to 4X AGP speed. No luck.

9. Turned all visual settings to Quality over performance. No luck.

10. Turned all visual settings to Performance over Quality. No luck.

11. Checked with DXDIAG, no problems found. All tests ran fine.

12. Cried myself to sleep in the fetal position. No luck.

What I HAVE found out...

I have 2 instances of XP Pro that I boot to. One for internet (the one giving me trouble), & one set for my more intensive games (ie: Painkiller and Doom3). All games work great in the games version of XP, so that rules out faulty hardware.

I could easily fix by just ghosting my games version of XP over & all would be well, but this is just bugging me. Anyone have any ideas? I'll even send a screenshot upon request.

Also, I'm ruling out the possibility of a virus as I type. One trojan found, so I'll post if that is the culprit. Thanx all. I hope we can figure out something.

 

[ski]

If both XP installations use the same chipset and video drivers, then what other differences are there between the two?

 

[ID10T16]

The only thing I can figure is corrupted DX files simply because you can't exactly remove those. If anyone knows a of a sure fire way to repair those files, please send a hint my way. Aside from re-installing that is. Also, could just be some corruption in the OS itself. I did however run SFC & it didn't find anything. You know... come to think of it, this may all have started after I installed SP2 and apparently opened pandora's box as I got error messages out the ears, & I have NEVER received as much spyware as I did after I installed SP2. Mayhaps I had a bad uninstall of the Service Pack. I will try that & maybe have some news for us.