My video is screwed (totally clueless here)

Okay. Here's the deal - I cannot watch any video of any kind with any video software on my computer.

If I open a player, and attempt to play something, the actual video screen in the program will stay black (or in QT's case, white), and the progress bar will advance very jerkily. After a few seconds of this, the program tends to freeze totally and makes my computer have an awful fit. I can ctrl-alt-del and close it without repercussions, though.

This is the same anywhere and with anything; in-browser videos on myspace will freeze firefox, for example.

The only recent change I've made was to install a new video card (GF 6600) and drivers. I've tried rolling back to a previous driver set AND reinstalling Direct X 9.0c, but no dice.

Any ideas? I mean goddamn, this is driving me crazy. Someone must have an idea :(

Try going into the advanced video settings and reducing the acceleration.

try vlcplayer. it's the 'codec-less' player. it can discount if you're having codec issues.

>>2

This works, but won't it fuck up my games too? :/

Sounds like possibly corrupted codecs. Go to http://home.hccnet.nl/h.edskes/mirror.htm and grab the klite codec pack (v2.54 as of this post). One thing I've noted about the pack and bad codecs is it doesn't always overwrite them, but will uninstall them, so if it doesn't work on install, uninstall it then reinstall it.

There's also the possibility that:
1) Your card isn't seated fully. Though this usually results in no signal at all, it's possible.
2) You're card's damaged or overheating. If you still have your old card, try popping that back in and giving it a shot. If you've got/can borrow a temp gun, check your card temp.
3) Ran into this one just the other day personally, your mobo doesn't want to play nice with your new card. Not much I can say for that, I've seen errors here run from small performance drops to artifacts to no signal at all.

Another thing you can try, instead of rolling back to an old driver set, go download the set you want, completely uninstall your current set, reboot, and install the drivers. Other than that, I'm too tired to think of anything else :P

>>4
Yes, it'll fuck the games up. You'll have to change the settings between applications.

I've had the same shit happen to me (Omega doesn't like my laptop).