Thanks for the advice. After spending quite some time digging through the forums on amd/ati's support page, it seems that using driver sweeper or similar programs with win7 is part of the reason why I'm stuck in this situation.
I installed visual studio 2008 for some classwork, and supposedly it comes with a c++ redistribute that is incompatible with ati unpackers/installers for drivers and ccc. So installing new software over the old driver and ccc is a no-go. To make matter worse, something must be different about the registry hive in win7- because the time tested method of restarting to safemode after uninstalling ati software, and running a driver cleanup program removes registry entries that point to archived and unpacked drivers being present on the system drive. So what happens, in my case at least, is this:
Upon restarting to normal boot to proceed with installation of the new drivers, I can't run the install software. CCC initiates as a tray icon and running program- but with no drivers in place (it is no longer listed in software in control panel to uninstall). Windows senses a driver isn't in place, searches, and finds the CCC that was not properly removed from the system and assumes a driver is in place- but the driver has been wiped. I've had to settle on the default shipping graphics driver included in win7. The process to reinstate that is a PITA too- I have to uninstall the display adapter from system devices, disable windows update sniffing online for driver updates (UNPLUG THE ROUTER- QUICK!!), subvert windows trying to plug a driver (pointing to the remnants of the unremoved CCC that has no functional driver), and before it can put something that isn't there in place and continue the problem from the beginning again, I had to (extremely fast- with a quicker reaction than I've ever used in a FPS game) stop it from directing the driver location to the broken software, and delete the backed up driver package (which also does not exist, or at least will not initialize). Fast is likely an understatement, it took me 5 reboots and starting the process over to get to that point.
So currently, I cannot update CCC, the display adapter driver, nor the ATI theatre drivers for my two tv tuners. It's all functional, but I'm needlessly getting blue screens due to running on the same ati drivers that likely were packaged in with windows before RTM->RC. It's like cross-country cruising on a pint-size spare tire.
So the lesson I learned: Skip the visual studio 2008 (2005 is fine, fingers crossed for 2010), and rely on iffy over-installations of new ATI software until a refreshed ati-prescribed process of driver cleaning is released. Supposedly there is a way to override the 2008 redistribute with the 2005 c++ files, but I've had no will to screw around with this equilibrium that's given me a working system for the time being- and the fix did not do it for me. Reinstall, I guess.
Are you running win7? I have 64bit ult version- interested to know if others have had this problem. It's not well documented, so I'm guessing any solutions (solutions- not shoddy workarounds) will not be highly publicized. Appearance is everything in politics, and now graphics adapter branding too!
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