RogueSix wrote on May 12, 2025, 17:25:
It might possibly help that I'm not using the nVidia App and I'm always doing a manual custom slim *and* clean install, i.e. I extract the driver.exe, delete the bloat, run setup.exe and always do a custom clean install of the drivers only.
I've never used Geforce Experience or the new nvidia app on this PC. I tried GFE once when it came out, and I promptly removed it and never installed it again.
I also extract the driver package and delete the bloat and preform a clean install.
RogueSix wrote on May 12, 2025, 17:25:
P.S.: To the guy with the start menu crash, well, that doesn't sound like a nVidia driver issue at all but more like a dying Windows install or even an impending hardware failure. I'd start a deeper system investigation (including but not limited to virus/malware deep scans ... sfc /scannow and all that jazz etc.).
Well I haven't had a single issue with the system since I built it in January. I had no issues the whole time I was using 572.70. As soon as I installed 576.28 I get issues, which went away and haven't happened again after installing 572.83.
It was more than an just explorer crash, I didn't want to write a short novel about it. The longer version if you're interested; Before we started Reforger that night, I had been playing DCS all day by myself working on and testing a mission for us when we play DCS next.
After we finished playing Reforger, I downloaded and installed 576.28. While the drivers don't tell you to restart after updating, I do it anyway. After the restart, I started DCS to finish some stuff in the mission before going to bed. I had only been in DCS for maybe 5 minutes when suddenly the mouse got extremely laggy as if it were at 10 FPS. I thought DCS had crashed, but none of the shortcuts for task manager worked, and CTRL-ALT-DEL didn't do anything. Then the system froze completely and I had to reset it.
The first thing I do if I have to restart a system without a clean shutdown is run chkdsk on all my drives, and no problems were found. What's weird is that I could open the start menu once, after that it refused to open. I could right click it and open file manager, terminal, etc., but left click did nothing. I could click and start programs pinned to the task bar and switch between them. If I clicked the task view button though, that's when explorer would restart and I got one more use of the start menu. I just happened to use that one time use start menu after installing the newest driver to launch DCS.
Running sfc /cannow was the next thing I did after noticing that was happening since I did have the lockup and had to force restart, but no problems were found. I then uninstalled the 576.28 driver, and installed 572.83 and it's been fine since.
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