Nvidea 7600 gs video card problem

Hello, and thanks for looking!
I'm having problems, I suspect with either DirectDraw or the agp driver, but I'm not really ruling anything out yet.

The motherboard is an Asrock K7S8X (SIS 746fx chipset and up to date bios)
Video card is a Xpertvision AGP Nvidea 7600gs

I installed windows XP and all updates, the video card drivers, and DirectX 9c all with no problems.

I then tried to install SIS AGP PCI-to-PCI bridge driver from the motherboard disk.
Before installation was complete, the grafics started to distort arount the mouse pointer. I rebooted to complete the installation, when I got to the screen with the windows logo and the scrolling blue bar the graffics distorted around the blue bar then the system froze.

After this I can do 2 things.
1, Reboot using last known good configuration, or
2, Reboot in safe mode, run winsockXP and reboot normally.

After doing this I tried playing the game Oblivion with all the settings high and it worked a treat.
Then I tried to play an .AVI but the video window stayed black, there was no sound and the system slowed so much I had to hit the reset button.

I turned hardware acceleration down and I could play the .AVI, but obviously, not games.

I went into dxdiag (no problems found on any page and all test work fine) and disabled Direct3D and AGP Texture acceleration, still no video. Then I disabled DirectDraw Acceleration and .AVI's work now, but I'll have to change the setting every time I want to play a game.

I've also tried changing the video card for an ATI 9200, installed the AGP driver without a problem and rebooted fine. But then I got the same problem booting as before when I put the 7600gs back in.

I've tried using agp drivers from the disk, and the Asrock and SIS websites.
I've tried video drivers from the disk, Xpertvisions website and even the OmegaDrivers.net version. Always the same problem.

The video card has been tested fine in another machine.
Here's another thing though, a friend has the exact same motherboard and video card, and he had problems with only getting videos or games and got a way round it, typically, he didn't write it down. :cry

Thanks in advance for any suggestions!

 

Solved it!
For anyone else who gets this problem.......

Once DirectX and the video drivers from the disk were installed, I installed the AGP driver (version 1.21 from the SIS website).

Rebooted into safe mode, ran WinsockXP to fix the registry.
Then I uninstalled the nVidia drivers, rebooted into safe mode again and ran DriverCleaner to get rid of any mess (but this leaves the extra Xpertvision tools behind ).

Then booted as normal and installed the nVidia Forceware driver from the Major Geeks drivers section, which not only works, but has a LOT more features in the nVidia control panel than the drivers on the disk or from the manufacturers site.