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Well, after about 11 hours worth of tech support from Microsoft, two separate tech guys, and being escalated to Microsoft Research and Development, they still came up empty handed with this.
Mind you, the entire time they were doing a remote desktop share so they could poke around for themselves. After all of this and two calls from R&D later, they finally suggested I either wait for a patch to SP1 or attempt to reinstall Vista.
Being the tech guy that I am, I chose option C - roll up my sleeves and troubleshoot it myself.
So I downloaded the catalyst 8.4 drivers from a different site (other than ATI), applied the Mobility Modder to it, and by some stroke of luck it ran. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not a genius here and I admit this is dumb luck.
So after it installed, I immediately checked to see if Second Life would load (it uses OpenGL), and found out it will not. Upon closing it, the program crashed with the culprit pointing to atioglxx.dll (unload) - so I manually overwrote that dll file with an older one and checked again. This time it didn't crash, and strangely enough the other programs which were crashing on close stopped crashing. (Paintshop Pro, etc)
So now I'm at stage 3 of this Frankenstein Monster of a problem. Went to Windows Update and found it was listing the ATI Graphics driver as in need of update (obviously because I just overwrote it manually) so I allowed it to continue.
So far all problems are corrected except two:
1. OpenGL is running horribly. After getting glview and running it, it's showing me that the driver is only reporting OpenGL 1.1. I'm going to go ahead and assume that is the culprit for the horrible OpenGL implementation and why anything which uses it is running at 1 FPS.
2. Second Life (which uses OpenGL) is refusing to run because it says that the drivers are either out of date or unsupported. This I am assuming is untrue because after checking with SL they are saying the latest drivers work. And since I have the latest drivers (supposedly) there shouldn't be an issue.
From this point on, I'll be trying to go back a few steps in the catalyst drivers to see if they will:
A. Actually Install. Could crash again for no reason or tell me a newer version is installed.
B. Actually work. As shown with this 8.4 version modded, OpenGL is at 1.1 basic and running at 1fps or worse.
C. Fix what is messed up. Other issues which this driver being borked has added to the pile.
Thanks for your insight with this. I'm gonna keep on fighting the battle over here.
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