I'm going to pull out my hair now.

All my Direct3D games have played quite well with my GeForce FX 5900 Ultra video card, as long as I'm using the latest drivers that fix the slow smoke bug discussed in that other old thread.

All games except two, that is. Halo and Far Cry.

Doom3 works perfect, PainKiller works perfect, UT2004 works perfect, etc. Only Halo and Far Cry are giving me trouble.

Now, I know those two games worked well once upon a time. I've played them both all the way to the end. Halo, twice in fact. But now, they both give me BSOD's when I run them. Far Cry gives me a BSOD immediately after the first level is loaded. Halo starts up OK, but then the graphics get steadily more corrupted as the game goes on-- objects disappearing and such, followed by random 3D shapes and textures on the screen-- followed by the BSOD.

The BSODs always say "kmode_exception_not_handled" and "nv4_disp.dll". The details of the addresses vary.

But here's the crazy part: I just made a fresh installation of Windows 2000 on an extra disk drive. Installed Service Pack 4, and installed the video driver and DirectX. Copied the game files over for Halo and Far Cry. And the games PLAY PERFECTLY without the slightest hint of trouble.

That's nice, there's clearly something corrupted about my current Windows 2000 installation, right? But the thing is... I just got done re-installing windows 2000 from scratch on this main disk drive. After doing so, it took me weeks to get all my applications and tweaks and such migrated over to the new system. There are hundreds of little things I do on a new system and it takes me quite a while to get it "just right" so everything is doing what I want it to do.

So... I could just reinstall windows again and get Halo/Farcry working perfectly, but there's clearly something, some specific little thing that gets installed on the new system, that's causing all this. And I know that eventually, I'd get around to making that one little change and bam, they'd stop working again. I'd rather forego the weeks of work to reformat the system. I'd rather figure out a way to trace down that one little change, whatever it is. But I have no idea what that one little change is. I'm totally stumped as to what it could be. Argh.

I don't even really expect anyone here to be able to help me, I just wanted to vent. I'm very frustrated. Thanks for listening.