I'm going to pull out my hair now.

All my Direct3D games have played quite well with my GeForce FX 5900 Ultra video card, as long as I'm using the latest drivers that fix the slow smoke bug discussed in that other old thread.

All games except two, that is. Halo and Far Cry.

Doom3 works perfect, PainKiller works perfect, UT2004 works perfect, etc. Only Halo and Far Cry are giving me trouble.

Now, I know those two games worked well once upon a time. I've played them both all the way to the end. Halo, twice in fact. But now, they both give me BSOD's when I run them. Far Cry gives me a BSOD immediately after the first level is loaded. Halo starts up OK, but then the graphics get steadily more corrupted as the game goes on-- objects disappearing and such, followed by random 3D shapes and textures on the screen-- followed by the BSOD.

The BSODs always say "kmode_exception_not_handled" and "nv4_disp.dll". The details of the addresses vary.

But here's the crazy part: I just made a fresh installation of Windows 2000 on an extra disk drive. Installed Service Pack 4, and installed the video driver and DirectX. Copied the game files over for Halo and Far Cry. And the games PLAY PERFECTLY without the slightest hint of trouble.

That's nice, there's clearly something corrupted about my current Windows 2000 installation, right? But the thing is... I just got done re-installing windows 2000 from scratch on this main disk drive. After doing so, it took me weeks to get all my applications and tweaks and such migrated over to the new system. There are hundreds of little things I do on a new system and it takes me quite a while to get it "just right" so everything is doing what I want it to do.

So... I could just reinstall windows again and get Halo/Farcry working perfectly, but there's clearly something, some specific little thing that gets installed on the new system, that's causing all this. And I know that eventually, I'd get around to making that one little change and bam, they'd stop working again. I'd rather forego the weeks of work to reformat the system. I'd rather figure out a way to trace down that one little change, whatever it is. But I have no idea what that one little change is. I'm totally stumped as to what it could be. Argh.

I don't even really expect anyone here to be able to help me, I just wanted to vent. I'm very frustrated. Thanks for listening.

Well, if you're okay with reinstalling everything, do so, except install those games first thing. Then every time you install something or make a change, run them. That way you'll know what thing breaks it. Or at least the last thing in the chain of modifications that breaks it.

Yeah, that's of course the very thing I want to avoid because it would take weeks.

What I'm looking for now is a way to do the "step by step" boot that we used to have under win95. Maybe there's an obvious driver or something that's getting loaded that I can remove. Don't see the "step by step" option for booting windows 2000 though.

I'd imagine it's more that something got overwritten rather than something's getting loaded that shouldn't be.

Actually, someone seems to have found a problem with some sort of keyboard macro recorder running. I'm sure that you've not got the same thing, but his method of killing processes from the task manager and trying it after killing each successive one seemed like a reasonable idea.

Yeah, been down that route. I've gone into task manager and literally killed everything that I possibly could, down to the bare minimum to keep Windows running, and I still get the same behavior.

xp

Hah!!!!! Found it!!!!

I'm a very happy boy right now.

Okay, one of the reasons I'd chosen to install 2000 Server on this box was because there are times when I want to remote-control it using Terminal Services.

Turns out, that's precisely what those games didn't like. Well, more specifically, it's what the Nvidia driver in combination with those games didn't like. Deinstalling terminal services solved the problem. Those games now run better than they ever did with these newset Nvidia drivers.

So y'all can take your Fischer-Price OS and... well... go play with it or something.

XP Pro does RDP as well; I TS into my machine all the time from work. Anyway, even if it didn't, that's what VNC is for.

Edit: Yeah, and see Roger's post too. For some reason I missed it.

I'm with him though. I installed XP at home and I really just like the way 200 did things better. To the point that I'd probably switch back if it wasn't such a PITA.

Did what things? I'm running XP now and it's doing everything virtually the same way as 2000 did. Of course, it takes a small amount of effort to change it from the insane XP defaults.

Mostly, I dislike how they've re-organized most of the configuration screens, making it harder to reach the settings I change most often. I dislike the way everything is animated so that it slows down things that I want to do quickly. I dislike the way the new start menu looks and operates. And I don't like the phone-home mentality.

I think the only feature of XP that I really like is how quickly it boots up. That alone makes me *almost* want to switch to it.

All of those except the phone home thing are easily undoable (TweakUI). The phone home thing can be ... ummm ... avoided.

The killer feature for me is the ability to have multiple users logged in and running programs at once. Obviously, only one user can control the console, but any backgrounded users' prgrams continue to run. This means I can have a long-running process going on and still let the wife use the computer.

So actually, the only thing you don't like is:

they've re-organized most of the configuration screens

...as all the other things you can change back to the way they work in Win2k, thankfully, because I too hate all those other changes. The normal WinXP start menu is an absolute disaster.

I can understand not wanting to support a whole bunch of WinXP machines, but the improved boot times and make it a worthwhile step up from Win2K for your own machine. Isn't WinXP "better" at running 3D games as well ?

I think the only feature of XP that I really like is how quickly it boots up.

Yes, but haven't you noticed that you pay for that speed at the other end of the process? XP takes (it seems like) forever to shut down.

I suspect that a Win2K computer would do "0 to 100 to 0" faster than a comparably configured XP machine, even though the XP would get to "100" much faster.

tanstaafl.

Yeah, XP stutdowns and hibernations only take a couple of seconds on my laptop.

There was a classic problem on NT4 Server with MS Exchange. As soon as you installed Exchange NT suddenly took 10 minutes to shutdown.

It was caused by the fact that the Exchange server service could take a while to shutdown on occasions, so when Exchange was installed it changed the registry setting that determines how long a service is allowed to shutdown. If I remember correctly the setting before was 60 seconds and after it is 600 seconds.

Unfortunately there was lots of NT4 boxes with NT services that worked fine, except that they hung on shutdown. Before the Exchange install this wasn't a major problem, after the Exchange install your NT4 box sat locked up for 10 minutes at shutdown.

Don't you just love it when a seemingly "safe" change hits a bunch of people when unexpectedly...