Wiped the drivers on my partner's XP PC (Pentium 4 2.something ghz) and reinstalled them, this fixed Neverwinter Diamond and Baldur's Gate being unable to start, but CCC still isn't able to start, so I have no idea what is going on there. We are planning to get a new power supply and upgrade that PC to a Geforce 6800/ATIsomething anyways to preserve my 9700 Pro, so it's good enough until we wipe the XP install during that upgrade to play it safe. Upgrading from a 9550 to the 9700 Pro broke something that wiping drivers alone just doesn't seem able to fix.

Spent some time eyeing Geforce 9800s for my own XP PC as it has a 9600GT and there is room to upgrade (not that it needs it at all) but we'll see, beyond running oblivion/new vegas/fallout 3 better there's not much point. If GoG had Skyrim Legendary Edition I would definitely consider fudging my build a bit and look at a "2007 but upgraded their GPU to play skyrim" build and get an HD 4xxx series card, or a GT 2xx series card. Sadly skyrim had no true legacy versions openly available.

CCC as in ATI/AMD Catalyst Control Center ..not starting you say ...causes errors you say ...this is not uncommon with that steaming pile of shite.

I remember back in the day nearly always having issues with it which got worse the more horrible web components they added to it. Even after AMD took them over it never got better, it was always hit or miss if any particular version of it would work correctly or require several clean uninstalls and reinstalls to fix it. The individual drivers are fine its the horrible web component UI/Interface they went with for CCC that breaks a lot and is just generally trash.

Your best bet is to find the 3rd party drivers (Omega etc) for your GPU and use them over the shit ATI/AMD ones.

Due to components of the catalyst driver installs and CCC hanging around like a bad smell and screwing up subsequent installations, there have been several utilities around for scrubbing all trace of catalyst off a system, to enable true fresh starts.

BitWrangler wrote on Today, 11:27:

Due to components of the catalyst driver installs and CCC hanging around like a bad smell and screwing up subsequent installations, there have been several utilities around for scrubbing all trace of catalyst off a system, to enable true fresh starts.

Even then ...YMMV, if so much as one registry entry got missed or one folder/DLL/INF is still present because Windows prevented its removal then yeah CCC will likely break itself again, ask me how I know.

3rd party drivers all the way, especially now with how easy they are to find, there is zero reason to use AMD/ATI CCC drivers on a retro system.

Trashbytes wrote on Today, 11:24:

CCC as in ATI/AMD Catalyst Control Center ..not starting you say ...causes errors you say ...this is not uncommon with that steaming pile of shite.

I remember back in the day nearly always having issues with it which got worse the more horrible web components they added to it. Even after AMD took them over it never got better, it was always hit or miss if any particular version of it would work correctly or require several clean uninstalls and reinstalls to fix it. The individual drivers are fine its the horrible web component UI/Interface they went with for CCC that breaks a lot and is just generally trash.

Your best bet is to find the 3rd party drivers (Omega etc) for your GPU and use them over the shit ATI/AMD ones.

It doesn't cause errors, it just doesn't start on boot or on command. The drivers themselves never actually were unstable, most games worked without issues outside of those three bioware games for whatever reason. This probably wasn't actually the ATI stuff at all, I found some Nvidia driver DLLs hiding from when this PC had an MX400 very temporarily. Windows XP must have dug something up because I never installed Nvidia drivers myself and the motherboard doesn't have a Nvidia chipset. The issue was probably lurking well before the 9700 Pro was installed and we tried to run BG/NW/BGII.