I'm going mad...

[Betamax]

In short:

I'm listing all events, even though most of them probably aren't relevant.

I'm running windows 2KPro, Asus a7a266 Rev. 1.03 1009, Athlon 900, 512 Crucial DDR, 120gb Seagate 8mb, 60gb Maxtor and a GeForece MX400 64mb.

5/6 days ago I had a 'windows protection error', but nothing ever seem to come of it and I've heard nothing since.

I installed MAME32+, but I couldn't get any games to work, though this was likely because I didn't run a ROM audit.

I arrive dhome from work to find that my sound has gone missing (no restart/shutdown occured). It turned out that it was a driver problem (the error said something about pins not being connected) so ended up downloading the latest C-media drivers AND the latest Nvidia drivers from Windows Update (this may be very NB).

MAME32+ now started to work -probably becuase of the new Nvivia drivers.

At the same time the sound problem emerged I noticed that Zoom Player was refusing to play some avi's, but I could in fact play them through BSPlayer. ZP showed the movie length, but it never started to play.

Anyways, the new C-media drivers fixed the sound problem, but then a buncha others problems started showing up: downloaded latest ZP, but it crashed the machine when I tried to use slow-motion, BitTornado/Opera/KLT would all just seize after 5-15 mins and the system would become un-useable with programs refusing to shutdown.

I did all the usual stuff like full virus/trojan scan etc, but it tuns out (I think) that the the problem is caused by a MS Hotfix http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=841382 and how it interferes with some drivers/processes with about 5% of users(I did do alot of reading, so excuse me if this sounds a bit confused).

The thing is that I must have installed the MS Hotfix a while ago, but the major problems I've been having only started after I installed the new Nvidia and C-media drivers, so I can only blame them. As far as I can tell the only solution for me seems to be to re-install windows.

I tried all i could to fix this:

Un-installing the hotfix in safe mode.

Un-installing the new Nvidia drivers and installing unsigned Nvidia drivers, and ultimately the drivers I got with the card in 2002.

Re-installing the hotfix (apparently safe to do), un-installing it again.

Un/re-installing BitTornado etc.

And various combinations of the above, but I still have the same problem.

Anyone (Krell)?

[Afn]

In short:

And various combinations of the above, but I still have the same problem.

New mame versions sometimes make the old roms unoplayable from previous versions.

When you perform a hotfix, it could write over files making zoom player unplayable.

1. perform hot fixes
2. run AD AWARE, SPYBOT and AVG ANITVIRUS
3. RE INSTALL ZOOM PLAYER
4. RE INSTALL DIVX CODECS
5. REINSTALL P2P programs that do not work; then check your firewall/program configuration

New versions of Media Player overwrite divx and other codecs on install.

[Betamax]

Problem seems to have half solved it self after replaced BitTornado with ABC, but I've still got a few symptoms.

Cheers.