Game Freezing

[koberulz]

I could use it like that all day if I wanted/could be bothered, apparently. The game itself locked up a few seconds later, the computer ran for several minutes until I manually rebooted.

[Patr1ck]

Did a little google search for screen corruption and found this which looks similar.

http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1476018

Turned out to be a hardware problem.

Try booting up in safe mode and see if the screen is still corrupted.

[koberulz]

Not the same issue. The issue I'm having crops up all at once, and has only occurred while playing 2k11 or after rebooting just after updating my video card drivers. It's just dots all over the screen.

If I could work out how to avoid the display driver not responding error, I'd update the drivers.

[Patr1ck]

You can do that in safe mode I believe.

[koberulz]

The display driver not responding is a known issue, due to some change in coding between XP and Vista. Or something.

Computer locked up whilst sitting there doing nothing today, I rebooted, and got a red overlay of about 50% transparency on the screen. So now both issues I'd ascribed to the new drivers have occurred after just a reboot. Other than when I'd updated the drivers, these issues never appeared before 2k11 started fucking up. Further, they're hard to test for in safe mode because they occur at random. Booting up isn't guaranteed to be a problem, neither is running the game - it could well just freeze.

Considering reinstalling Windows at this point, perhaps upgrading from Vista to 7 if the copy my mom uses allows multiple installs. Am I likely to be better off then, or do I need a new graphics card? How would I tell?

[koberulz]

Ran in safe mode, it wouldn't let me run the game. I click on it, it starts to boot up, the process appears, and then it disappears again before actually doing anything. Event viewer shows the same couple of problems pretty much every boot-up (I'm paraphrasing here, I can't remember the exact words and the events seem to have disappeared):

ATK Fast User Switch terminated unexpectedly.

The following boot-up drivers could not be opened:
NCPro
StarOpen

\SystemRoot\SysWow64\drivers\MTictwl.sys was blocked due to an incompatibility.

\SystemRoot\SysWow64\drivers\StarOpen.sys was blocked due to an incompatibility.

[Patr1ck]

I meant you can update the drivers in safe mode.

[koberulz]

The game's the only half-decent way to break the display, though. It only happens on bootup very rarely (and had never happened before I installed the game).

I'm fairly sure at this stage that it's not the drivers. I had the same errors with newer drivers. I attributed the errors to the newer drivers, because they occurred immediately after the update, but now that they're happening with this driver version I can't see how it's the problem. It's much more likely to be the card, or the Windows install, or Vista, or something else, than the drivers.

The newer versions of the drivers caused the problems I'm having now on the next boot, the current drivers were completely free of issues until I installed 2k11.

[koberulz]

What's the best move from here?