This is not a support request, it's a rant. Every since SP1 came out for Windows 7 back in July my wife's PC won't run DirectX 9. A 560 Ti for display, a 275 for PhysX, dual SSD's, dual velocity raptors, 12GB memory, a 925 CPU, about $3k in this thing and now it can't play most of the games on the market. Thankfully she only actually plays WoW and a command line switch can set it to run as DirectX 11. Heroes VI just came out, she wants to play that, but she sol. I've tried the cards individually, changed slots. It's a software problem, not hardware. It's crashing in NVD3DUM.dll. The Direct3D driver for the video card. It crashs upon initialization. Things like the Heavan benchmark that lets me select 9/10/11 crashs under 9 and 10, but not 11. WoW runs fine on 11, crashs with 9.

The only thing left that I can think to do is switch to AMD. That's far from a certainity though. Just because it's reporting crashs in the driver doesn't mean it's actually the driver. The application calls DirectX which calls the driver. Since it's bounds check error likely it's passed an invalid address by DirectX. It could be some type of virus, but three differant ones haven't found one. She had some problem with her e-mail getting accessed by some unknown party so I virus seems likely, but three virus scanners don't fine it. I identified all the running processes. Why a virus would alter Direct3D except to crack passwords I can't imagine. I have monitors running all the time, there's no high CPU/GPU, disk or network usage. DirectInput would make more sense if they want to steal passwords.

The idea was to run nVidia on her computer and AMD on mine so I have access to both. I'm just running an ASUS CG series off the shelf with a 5770. I have neither the cooling nor power to run anything bigger. I'll have to pull the card from mine and stick it in hers to be sure the AMD drivers fixes the problem. I need to clean mine out, I'm runing 100+ C playing games. Beyond that it's install Visual Studio and the DirectX SDK on her computer and try to figure just what's going wrong. I hate to do that since her's is suppose to be a clean machine. With a bunch of SDK's and everything integrated with Visual Studio it's easy to miss details. Maybe overriding the programs and turning features off in the driver, except most games select barebones options when they install.

This is just frustrating and thus the rant.


PS: And ranting does really work, I found it, sort of, she's using her computer so I'll have to narrow it down. It's either RivaTuner or MSI Afterburner. I shut them both down and DirectX 9 ran fine.