softmachine

After just getting my PC up and running again after a month or 2 by the reset bios jumper since I'd accidentally set it to detect system fan, a few days later having played this game Roma Victor since Februrary up to the point it screwed up and 2 days after fixing it... I load it up and a few minutes into the game it freezes. The whole computer. It wouldn't let me alt tab, use ctrl alt del, nothing. Restart manually, and I start getting "ati2dvag.dll" infinite loop errors, sometimes at load up, sometimes before windows even loads, sometimes at desktop. Other times the windows loading screen will be scrambled.

Now I'd had trouble when I first started playing this game as it froze every 2-5 minutes, but it didn't take the whole comp with it. I resolved that after I found the solution to change "VIA CPU to AGP controller" to "PCI standard PCI-to-PCI bridge" and it's been set on that ever since. I've had minimal success switching around options in catalyst control center. The best I'll get is a half an hour out of the game, and then it screws up again, the bulk of the time within 10 seconds or less it freezes up, even on the loading screen now and again. I also get just as often "power saving enable monitor will shut down..." messages and every so often a "frequency out of range" error. My HDD temp shows consistently at lower 30s celsius and below...

My graphics card is a Radeon X1650
I'm running Windows XP SP3

I've tried
- changing screen refresh rate
- enabling/disabling write combining
- enabling/disabling vpu recover
- changing agp speed between off and 4x
- setting 3d gpu settings to performance instead of quality
- changing 3d refresh rate override between disabled/set to desktop/60hz
- and combinations of these ^
- uninstalling display adapters in device manager and uninstalling drivers in add/remove programs then try different graphics card compatible drivers from amds website from 9.2 package to 9.3
- restoring computer to multiple earlier points
- running a full disk check

From hours of googling these specific errors related to amd and radeon the problem seems widespread but mine came out of nowhere. I don't remember downloading anything or making ANY setting changes. I was playing my game fine for hours, closed it, loaded up later and bam. I'm pretty much fed up with scouring forums with no results