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Video causes black screen crash

Bliss 101Bliss 101 Registered User regular
edited February 2010 in Help / Advice Forum
I've been trying to help a friend with his display problem, but so far we haven't been able to fix it. Some videos (youtube, cutscenes in some games like Divinity II) cause the screen to go black with only the mouse cursor visible. At first you can move the cursor, but its movements get choppier until eventually the cursor disappears too and all you can do is reboot the computer.

This happens randomly. You can watch a video on youtube without any problems, then watch the same video again and computer goes tits up. Same with the in-game cutscenes. It does not happen with movies on Windows Media Player. I don't understand this stuff well enough to determine whether this would be an issue with codecs, display drivers, or something else.

The comp is running Windows Vista, with a Radeon HD5750 card. I've uninstalled and reinstalled the ATI drivers to no avail. The computer used to have a Geforce 8800GT card that fried itself and had to be replaced, so maybe something got fucked up when switching to a different set of drivers. In fact, I'm pretty sure something like that happened, because according to my friend some games still demand Nvidia PhysX to be installed, or else the games won't run, and that's GPU-specific software as far as I know. Problem is, there are no visible Nvidia software components left, so I have no idea what could be causing this. Any ideas?

edit: Actually there is an Nvidia remnant on the computer: Nvidia Performance monitor, although it's not running. Trying to uninstall gives a "this program requires nvidia blah blah blah to run" error.

Also, there's another display oddity going on. Sometimes the Windows mouse cursor suddenly becomes twice the normal size, and stays that way until you reboot or start a game. It's like the mouse cursor suddenly forgets what the current screen resolution is, if that makes sense.

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Bliss 101 on
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