I already fixed this problem but I thought I'd offer it as a "warning" or at least in case anybody else had similar problems. More a story then a request for help.

These are the same specs shown in my profile, with a 9800GT.


I was trying to maximize the speed of the eDuke32 Polymer renderer (it's a beaut') So I checked to see if there were any driver updates.

There were- I was running 197.13, the latest version was 258.96. Seemed like a big jump, so I updated.

I didn't reboot write away (which seems to be my first mistake). It wasn't until this morning that I rebooted, and that was when the problems started.

I first noticed the issue trying to start winamp- it stopped responding almost immediately. But what confused me was that even using End Process refused to kill it, in either task manager or Process Explorer.

I tried a few more times with no success. I suspected malware Because everything was about as slow as it would be on my old 350Mhz K6-2, and considering this is a quad core 2.33Ghz I found that concerning. So I ran Malwarebytes, or more precisely, tried to run malware BYTES, it froze the same way as winamp the moment it started scanning.

Media Player classic: same issue.
Visual Basic 6, Visual Studio 2008 and office started just fine, though. I was rather stumped.

I discovered that I could start winamp in a "safe mode" of SORTS by holding the left and right control keys, this stopped all the general plugins from loading. And, lo and behold, the program started fine.


I wasn't sure what to make of it, but EVENTUALLY I decided to try rolling back the video driver.

Now, everything is back to normal, or so it seems, so FAR it would seem to be a bug in the video driver. That would explain some of the behaviour, one of winamps general plugins was for it's skinning capabilities, and Media Player Classic clearly tries to use various hardware features.

Still somewhat stymied as to why I had no problems with aero glass during this TIME. But Driver problems can always cause the strangest symptoms. So, if anybody else comes to the forum with similar issues with a driver update, it would seem that rolling back isn't a bad idea.