I installed a game, earth 2150. It wants to install media player. I guess this is just to play the intro movie, that doesn't work anyway. So I let it install windows media player and the default stuff that came with it "mpeg-4" codec" "midi-file" and other stuff like that. For some reason after this, my graphics are all funky, any and all images have shadows of some kind that point right and alternate dark and light. My simple solid colored backdrop looks all wavy and weird while loading. Likewise when I highlight text, there are dark and light wavy patterns that go up and down in the highlight. I can't imagine how the game and media player install would have anything to do with this, but it started immediately after it, so it must be connected. I have tried uninstalling the media player, (it will only allow me to revert to a earlier version) and the game- Earth 2150, but that did not fix it. I even tried uninstalling the codec, though online instructions for this didn't exactly fit, it had no effect as well.(though I don't know for sure if I even managed to uninstall the codec) A picture of the problem as I see it, I hope it shows in the picture. Another one for thoroughness. P.S. I see it lists some random manufacturer for my computer, well ignore that. I built this PC myself. Except it wouldn't let me leave that blank. I tried putting "built myself" but it didn't take for some reason.

Did you get the game up and running? If so, did it play as expected? I am not a gamer but my guess would be that some settings in the graphics card have been reset by the game. Which settings would depend on the game and the abilities of the card. I notice you are running a pretty old processor. Did you verify your hardware meets the minimum requirements for the game?

I was helping someone find the sherlock holmes theme for their desktop and ended up installing it on one of my PCs. It made all kinds of changes to the desktop that stayed even after I removed it. As I recall I had to do a scanreg/restore to get things back to normal. If you're not familiar with restoring a previous registry, you need to start up the PC and, before the OS starts to load, start tapping F8. A boot menu should come up. Choose 'safe mode command prompt only'. Then at the c:\> prompt type scanreg/restore and enter. Choose a registry to restore from a date just before you installed the game. Afterwards you may need to reinstall WMP as scanreg only restores a previous registry--not any deleted files or software. Also, normally only the last 5 registries--one for each new day you start the PC--are kept so if it's been longer than that a registry restore won't help.

The game ran fine, other then the opening movie thing not working. But research into that opening movie suggests its hard for alot of people to get it to work. What difference would it make if the game met sys req anyways? The issue is ordinary graphics outside the game, like that of a simple printed page and so on. Actually, I don't see any graphics problems at all in the game itself, which uses 3d graphics BTW. Did you look at the pictures I posted? Do you see the graphics problem that I speak of in them?

Another oddity, after installing the game, I see a C prompt at part of the loading, when I didn't before. I tried what you suggested, DAVEINCAPS. But most of the listed saved previous stated resulted in "system restore operation failed" which then caused the entry to vanish. One of the only ones that didn't do this wasn't old enough to be of any good anyway. Got anything else I can try? Might reinstalling the graphics card driver help?

When you get the 'restore failed' message try rebooting and doing it again. The attempt may create a new file and delete the oldest but the rest should still be there.

I tried that dave, there is no longer any restore points older then today listed when I do this, and I know this issue started at least a few days ago.