ATI random crashes in IE

bamos

I've been experiencing random crashes for the last few months since I installed my ATI AIW 9800 Pro. It would be fine for a while after an OS rebuild, then suddenly it would start crashing. Not too often, usually once per day. When it crashes, it simply drops to a black screen and reboots. There's no error message, and nothing shows in Event Viewer. It basically drops the OS so fast, it doesn't have time to write the event. This problem happens almost exclusively in Internet Explorer during a page load. I have crashed a few games, but those crashes don't appear to be related. When a game crashes on the system, it just drops to the OS, it doesn't drop the whole system like this error.

I recently narrowed it down to the video driver. I rebuilt the OS in February and initially installed the 5.2 drivers. Everything worked fine, so I believed that it was just a problem in Windows that was eliminated in the rebuild. Then, a few weeks ago, I upgraded to 5.3, and it started crashing again that night. So, it appears that the PC doesn't like it when I upgrade Catalyst. Looking back over the time I've had the card, that seems to fit the pattern.

I've tried all the tricks I've found on the web, but nothing seems to be eliminating the problem. I've rolled it back to 5.2. I've upgraded to the new 5.4 drivers. I've used Driver Cleaner following all the instructions. Nothing has worked so far.

I thought I had it fixed a few days ago. I tried using the normal control panel version of the driver instead of the CCC version. I figured that since it uses .Net, it might be tied into the problem. It went two days without crashing, but low and behold, it crashed today.

Anyone have any ideas? I really don't want to have to rebuild Windows every time I upgrade the video driver.

System config:

Windows XP Pro SP2 - fully patched
IE6SP2
AMD 64 3500+
Asus AV8 Deluxe
AIW 9800 Pro
512mb - tests good
Antec True Power 480
SB Live Platinum
1 SATA drive and 1 ATA 100
2 Optical drives

The system is not overheating, and the power supply is solid.