[MMike]

I've been fighting with this for a couple of years now. Same old Radeon 9550 card.

I reinstall the driver. Works fine. I then shut down and restart and it reverts back to a "Default monitor" and the adapter is "unavailable". The driver still shows up in my programs. But I'm stuck in a near VGA mode.

My audio is screwed up too....as I have none. VIA RAID Soundmax for a K8V-MX. I just downloaded and installed the latest and greatest drivers for that too. Didn't do anything.

I'm more interested in the video card issue though.......ALSO XP (SP3) is telling me that there's an update available for my Radeon, it fails to install.

 

[vibiker]

It sounds like Windows is finding a more "suitable" driver. If it is what I think it is, you will have to find out which .inf file contains the information for new vga-like driver and delete (or rename) it.
Look in your %windir%\inf folder for the culprit.

 

[binary visions]

Actually, Windows will not change your driver preferences unless it determines that your currently assigned driver is actually unsuitable for your card.

Most of the time, this is caused by the driver being incorrectly written and hence it will not match with the video card. When Windows boots, it'll look at the driver, determine that it's not the appropriate one, and discard it. Only after that will it go find another driver. I'd recommend not deleting other drivers since it probably won't fix the problem and probably will destroy any fail-safe you have if you need to boot without a driver.

Honestly, ATI has struggled for years to write good drivers. It's absolutely amazing that a company as large as ATI can write bad drivers for 10 years straight. Not all of them are bad, but enough are.

Have you contacted ATI about this?

 

[johnbryanpeters]

This reminds me that pigboy offered me an nVIDIA adapter...