Originally Posted by Zoraster

okay. reinstalled the asus chipset drivers from dvd and the same thing happened.

i'm pretty frustrated.
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My motherboard was replaced recently (as well as the vid card and ram) but it had been working just dandy until the other day.

reinstalling them won't fix it, you have to remove it all first, then use driver sweeper to clear out the remainder. Depending on the installer, some installers check if a file is already there and if it is, it skips reinstalling that file. So you don't really get a reinstall if you have corrupted files.

Also, if you changed your mobo and vid card, you definitely have left over drivers from the old h/w. You need to get rid of those files. If your control panel shows any programs that belonged to your old mobo/vid card, you have to uninstall them too.

I see that this board uses the ATI chipset. Try following this order:

With control panel:
1. Uninstall the Nvidia video driver ( don't reboot yet).
2. Uninstall the ATI chipset drivers
(to be safe, uninstall anything Nvidia or ATI from the control panel)
3. If there are separate NVIDIA or ATI directories containing files ( eg: c:\program files\nvidia... or c:\program files\ati... delete them. You don't want to have any trace of files left over
4. Reboot into safe mode. If the system prompts you to install anything, don't let it.
5. Run drive sweeper, click on ATI and Nvidia and click analyse then clean

this should clean out your existing drivers and remaining files.

6. Reboot. you will likely be at 800x600 16bit resolution so things will look big and crappy. If the system asks to install drivers, don't let it.
7. Pop in your Chipset dvd and run the installer from there.
8. After chipset is installed, reboot.
9. If the system asks to install video, don't let it.
10. Install Nvidia video driver

This should do it.

It is difficult to provide recommendations when you can't see the system, but I have had this exact error before and the above method was the only way I could fix it. At first I thought I had a h/w problem, ripped my system apart, but in the end it was a driver problem. At least for me.

If this doesn't work and since you likely have files left over from your older h/w that isn't easy to find, you may be best to do a new OS install. I usually hate to recommend that as it is rather drastic but your OS may be zombied from having drivers for 2 different sets of h/w and it would be very difficult to find the stragglers of old files and faster to reinstall.