Video driver update causing problems with GW and other games

I'll give you all a short review of my issue, because I tend to rattle on too much sometimes.

About a month ago I was having some serious issues with GW freezing and crashing on me. A guildmate helped me pick out some updated Nvidia drivers for my computer, and I downloaded and installed them...and the problem was fixed. Unfortunately, in the process I unintentionally uninstalled my chipset drivers. So last night I uninstalled those video drivers, installed a unified driver from Nvidia to resolve this, then installed my new video drivers again. And everything was fine, or so it seemed...

To put it simply, the GW login screen now resembles a test pattern orgy. Random splashes of color, odd boxes all over the place, and only vague outlines of familiar things like the ship that sails around on the login screen. I tried a couple of videos I have stored on my comp...they look fine. So I tried to run Diablo II, the only other game I play regularly, to see if this has something to do with games themselves. It completely locked up the computer...I had to reboot manually.

My guess is that I need to adjust something...but I'm not sure what. I can provide DxDiag and/or Everest reports, if such are needed. But any advice will be greatly appreciated...I'm starting to go into GW withdrawl here...

Thanks!

Tanith

Try uninstalling and reinstalling every driver for the system in the current order:

Chipset drivers
Display drivers
Sound card drivers.

Also run virus/spyware scans, defrag and scandisk

If this doesnt work I would backup and format my hard drive and start over from scratch (well wouldnt really need to back-up as I have a seperate windows partition), and if it still happened, I'd buy a new graphics card.

Hope that helps.

A bit of an update here...I ran the DxDiag program, and came up with a couple of failed tests at D3D8 and D3D9 ("Failure at step 32", whatever that means). The spinning cube appeared on D3D8, but actually resembled my GW login screen...colors splashed everywhere. On D3D9 it had a pattern of some sort, but not the DirectX logo that was supposed to appear. There was a problem "at step 20" during the sound test as well...the last few were distorted.

I'm posting this hoping it will help isolate the problem. And bhavv...thanks for your response, I will keep it in mind. But first I'm going to explore all my options. I'll keep y'all posted.

Tanith

I would do as bhavv suggest but before re-installing the drivers (or doing a full format / reinstall of windows).

Un-install all the drivers, then
Run a driver cleaner program such as http://www.softpedia.com/get/Tweak/U...essional.shtml
Then re-install the newest drivers.

Also I would grab this program quick, use the Softpedia download, they moved to version 2.0... and it's no longer freeware but 1.5 Pro version is still freeware.