I've got half life 2 here, brought it from Six steam, excellent Fps i have to say. Ever since I've had this game, while in play it will freeze for a whort while..ive had the odd crash aswell. While HL2 freezes, it resumed play within within 10 seconds, but this is quite a lot if valuable time in a fps such as this and highers my chances of getting killed. I've taken off the side of my pc case to see if my cpu or gpu cards overheating, yes it's helped, HL2 doesnt freeze has much but I still get the occasional halt here or there. When games tend to overheat isn't it normal to see a artifact or artifacts of some nature? Fortunately, theres no artifacts around the time of the crashing or in any of my games. I've been running nvidia's 6.7.6.6 drivers beautifully until yesterday, as i installed nvidias latest forceware. They completely slowed down everything that relied on direct x, so i reverted back to 6.7.6.6. I have the same freezing problem with unreal tournament 2004.. But the weird thing with this game is that, when i higher the settings it removes the problem of freezing but if i higher the settings in HL2, the game instantly crashes. Any thing above medium in detail in HL2 wins a guaranteed reset. Is there a driver removal utility out there that is able to completely remove the every trace of the nvidia drivers? That way i could do a fresh install and take it from there.. Thanks for any help

It does sound like overheating troubles, so upgrade your cooling system, or just make sure it's even working. Also, if you have it overclocked, the stock heatsink and fan usually can't keep up with the greater heat production that comes with faster speeds. If it's freezing and crashing all the time, it may fragment the hard drive or damage some data, which is an nasty thing if that damaged data is an nVidia driver or any other crucial system driver. So this is what I would do: first upgrade the cooling system until the system is stable, then format the hard drive and reinstall everything to make sure that no drivers or system files are corrupt. That's just what I would do because I have no problem formatting the hard drive; but maybe you can't. If you don't want to format and reinstall, just try to repair the damaged files(if there are any), and try to reinstall or update the drivers for whatever device was affected. But it's also possible that the heat in there was so great that one or more(most likely the one that's acting up, like the video card or CPU)components had heat damage, making the part permanently damaged, I'm sorry to say. Hey, it can happen, esspecially if you see smoke... Humm, a utility to remove all nVidia drivers... I don't know of one, but you could uninstall all the programs that came with the drivers (like nView or whatever)and then do it the dirty way: run "regedit" (it comes with windows) and dig in to the registry and try to uninstall all the drivers through there. Be careful though, because there are some REALLY delicate system files in there that are easily mistakable for nVidia drivers. So I suggest contacting an nVidia tech via phone or email for exactly what files to delete in regedit, if you're going to go that way. I'm no expert with regedit, so don't ask me, I just know it's possible.

Try driver cleaner, you can get it from majorgeeks.com i think. It should clean up your drivers. So long, and thanks for all the fish! Douglas Adams. Processor=P4 3GHzHT Motherboard=ASUS P4SD-LA with Intel 848P chipset ATI 9600XT 128meg. 160g HDdont know which kind