Help! NVidia driver upgrade causes Media Player to hang

[imported_usagi]

Hi, I wanted to give my aging AGP box one last upgrade, so I picked up an XFX 7600GT to replace its Gigabyte 6600. When I installed the new card Windows informed me that my current NVidia drivers didn't support the new card, so I grabbed the latest WQHL drivers from nvidia.com (93.71) and installed. After that, everything seems fine - two monitors in dual view, played City of Villains for a while (really liked the improvement in performance), was pretty happy....then I tried to play a video in Windows Media Player and the CPU goes to 100% and Windows basically hangs. Same thing in Quicktime or DivX player as well. I read the release notes - the videos I'm playing are not HD, just your usual BitTorrent-ed TV episodes.

I saw a related thread at http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview...atid=31&threadid=1997838&enterthread=y
but there was no solution to the problem there.

Now if I swap the 7600GT out for the 6600, I still have the same problem. If I leave the 7600GT in and uninstall the nvidia display drivers, media player can run. So this is obviously a driver conflict of some sort. If I put the 6600 back in and fall back to driver level 84.21 the video works find again, but that driver level doesn't seem to support my 7600 GT. Here's my config:

MB : Gigabyte K8NS-ULTRA (939) BIOS level F10 (latest) w/Athlon 64 3000+
Windows XP Home SP2 with all patches
Windows Media Player 10 or 11 - I tried uninstalling 11 and falling back to 10, same problems.

Gigabyte GF6600 : WMP hangs with nvidia drivers 91.47 or 93.71, works with 84.21
XFX 7600GT : WMP hangs with 91.47 or 93.71, card not supported by 84.21.

Now I just bought the card, but I spent an entire day yesterday trying to resolve these problems and I can't. I'm going to be out of town all of next week so I may have to return the card this weekend if I can't get it working. If anyone has any suggestions I would really, really appreciate it.

 

[imported_usagi]

OK, I finally got around the problems. I downloaded DriverCleaner.net which cleaned some driver muck out of my system, but that alone wasn't enough to fix the problem. With the system cleaned out and running on the generic VGA drivers I downloaded the latest nForce3 chipset drivers for my MB (v510) from the Gigabyte web site, installed those then reinstalled the new video drivers. Now my 7600GT is working and WMP no longer hangs. I hope this helps anyone else that runs into the same problem.

 

[Acanthus]

Im glad you figured it out, i was going to reccomend exactly what you did, because ive had the exact same problem in the past.