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Since I started using my ATI video card, this problem happens. The motherboard is ECS A780GM with processor AMD X2 5000 and the onboard video card is ATI Radeon HD 3200. I installed ATI driver CATALYST 11-2 in my Windows XP OS SP3 (with all patches) and since that time my computer will often hang (blue screen) with error 'ati2dvag is entering infinite loop'.

I have searched many places, this page is the most useful, where the discussion leads to several findings:

  • The crash can be reliably triggered by activating character animation (Rover the dog) in windows search
  • The crash is more likely to happen when internet explorer is open. Firefox or Chrome don't trigger the crash
  • CATALYST 10-8 doesn't have this error, 10-11 does. 10-12, 11-1, 11-2, 11-3 all produce this error
  • High end ATI cards (3800 series) also have this problem

So based on that info I'm rolling back the driver to 10.8 and I haven't had blue screen yet.

Anybody here has more information about this problem? Which other version of the driver works (higher than 10.8)?

1 Answer 1

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I think I fixed it. (See NOTE)

(System: XP SP3 with HD 3850 AGP graphics; ASUS K8V Deluxe MBoard)

1.0  Clean Uninstall all ATI drivers
     1.1 uninstall all ATI programs listed under "Control Panel/Add or Remove Programs"
     1.2 uninstall the graphics display driver "Control Panel/System/Hardware/Device 
         Manager/Display Adapaters/{Display Card}/driver/uninstall"
     1.3 Use DriverCleaner.NET
         1.3.1 Download and install DriverCleaner.net (from www.drivercleaner.net)
         1.3.2 IMPORTANT (see Note) Click "Tools/Cab Cleaner" on the DriverCleaner menu bar
         1.3.3 Repeat 1.3.2 for all listed Cab's.
         1.3.4 Select "Select Multiple Cleaning Filters" and then select all services that begin 
               with "ATI"
         1.3.5 Scan and Clean these services
         1.3.6 Repeat 1.3.5 until no more services are found on the scan
     1.4 Delete files from the systems disk (may need to reboot in safe mode)
         1.4.1 Delete any folder beginning with "ATI" from the {system root) directory
         1.4.2 Delete and folder beginning with "ATI" from {system root)/Program Files directory
     1.5 (ADVANCED, not always necessary) Run a registry cleaner program and reboot.
2.0 Download and install the latest AMD (ATI) drivers:  version 11.4 or later.

NOTE: The ATI drivers, including ati2dvag, are classifed by Windows as "system files". As such they come under Windows File Protection (WFP) described in http://support.microsoft.com/kb/222193. An attempt to overwrite any of these files by, say, installing a new version of the drivers, is defeated by the system, and files from the original Windows install (in this case contained in a .CAB file) are used instead. The result is that some files of a newly installed ATI driver suite (those that are in the .CAB file) will be an older version that came with Windows, while some files (those that are not in the .CAB file) will be the newly installed version. These files do not necessarily work together; hence the ati2dvag loop. The basic fix is to remove all ATI files from all Windows .CAB files so old files will not be used instead of the newly installed version. DriverCleaner.net/Tools/Cab Cleaner does this.

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