VPU recovery, skuzzy please help

[Steve]

My nephew wants to start playing this game so I set up an account for him on my pc and he is getting booted from the game and then my computer is showing the following popup:


VPU Recovery has reset your graphics accelerator as it was no longer responding to graphics driver commands.


also, the resolution for the desktop gets scaled back to 800X600.

The system seems fine... nothing like this happens in any other game/application.

I have an ATI radeon 9800 pro w/ the latest drivers, direct X9.0b.
All of this on a system that hard the hard drive scrubbed prior to this vid card installation.  What the heck is this?

I was not getting this message at all prior to today.  Ideas anyone?

Ty for any advice/info.



Steve

[Skuzzy]

That is a feature in the ATI drivers.  It is supposed to invoke itself when the driver thinks the video card is no longer responding.

You can turn this off in the ATI control panel and see if it really is not responding.

[Steve]

Thanks skuzzy, I saw the tab.

Interestingly, I watched him  play... it only seems to do it if he has been alt-tabbing in and out of the game.  Is he confusing the vid card w/ this?

[Skuzzy]

I have not been able to find a commonality with people having ALT-TAB problems.

It happens with every type of video card with any given driver combination.  The two ATI systems I have access to have no problems whatsoever, but those are very tightly maintained.

I get reports from people and there is simply no coorelation with the systems that I can put my finger on.

My best guess about any ALT-TAB problems might have something to do with some external program/utility is causing it.  Possibly some nasty spyware programs/DLL's.
I did manage to get one users ALT-TAB problems fixed.  He was running some utility that automatically set his wallpaper/screensaver to random images.

It also corrected some other problems as well.  But that has been about it.