Bizzarre issue.

My system specs : MSI 975X platinum motherboard.
core2duo 1.86 ghz CPU, geforce 7600 GT, 1.5 GB ram, 650 W PSU, realtek HD onboard audio. XP proffesional up to date ( all hotfixes SP2, e.t.c) all up to date drivers.

Now heres the deal, when i play older games, more than a couple of years old, 10-15 minutes into gameplay the game will hang, and then the sound loops continiously, i have to alt+tab out and back into the game, and within 2 minutes its doing it again.
It dosnt do this on games like oblivion or counterstrike:source which run very nice.

Sounds like a dualcore issue right? i installed the windows hotfix, enabled it, still does it, i tried turning off Nvidias multithreaded optimisation, still does it, i tried manually setting affinity, still does it.

the games it does it on are counter-strike 1.6, warhammer 40k dawn of war, freelancer, (freelancer does it very bad ) and a few other older games ive played.

Now seeing as ive tried every dualcore related fix ive seen bandied about, i then considered my onboard soundcard, which are usually culprits, so i disabled it in the bios, and the game still hung, i tested each memory stick on its own, and in different configurations and ran memtest.... nothing.
i have no overclocks, im not overheating, the PSU wattage is fine for the mobo. i dont have any viruses or spyware.
i did a clean reinstall of windows, it still did it, i tried older Nvidia drivers, beta nvidia drivers....
im at my wits end, surely it must be a hardware issue if a windows reinstall didnt fix anything... but why does it only do it on less intensive games?

someone please give me some ideas to try. :cry

 

Did you try compatibility mode?

 

yup. setting the game to run on one core, and setting it to compatibility mode seem to prolong the play period without the problem occuring, but it still happens sooner or later, and once its happened once, itll keep happening every 5 minutes.

 

Got a second HD and an older version of windows?

If a reinstall didn't fix it, then it might be a processor problem. Try reinstalling DirectX. It's happened to me on occasion where one of the drivers was corrupted. Try running DXDiag first though.