Latest nVidia driver and HDCP issue

[pgman]

Hi. I don't post here often because my knowledge of this stuff is almost zero. I have little to add to most threads that is of any meaning.

I am just wondering if anyone else had an issue with nVidia's ForceWare 260.99 driver (released earlier this week)? I just loaded it today and had all kinds of trouble. I couldn't control the resolution on my "secondary" monitor (which is my HDTV) and the whole PC crashed hard when I was trying to watch recorded TV (BSOD). I had to go into safe mode to un-install the driver. I rolled back to 258.96 and everything is happy again.

I am thinking that some of the issues I was having with the newer driver had to do with the HDCP handshake, which would NOT happen between my Samsung and my GeForce 8600GTS graphics board. It kept saying that my hardware was not HDCP compliant.

I'm just wondering if anyone here has had any similar experience - the nVidia driver updates have almost always been good for me previously. Only one time before did they release a driver that I would call "broken", and that was back in the 7xxx-series days.

If nothing else, please be cautious with this new release, I think it may have issues.

By the way, the above information applies to the Win7 64-bit driver and the GeForce 8600GTS video hardware. I am not sure if the issues I was having were specific to that combination of hardware and OS, and I know SageTV does not officially support Windows 7. I am happily running the "Beta" SageTV7 (actually, I paid to unlock it, so I am not sure it is a beta anymore) and it works brilliantly right now.

[Rico66]

Yes, I did also have all kinds of problems with the 260.x drivers. The issues that I saw were a bit different than yours (I have 240gt), but it kind of reminds of ATI drivers (...).
I had problems defining a custom resolution that I have been using for a long time. Somehow I had to settle for a slightly different resolution. While this wasn't that big of a problem, there were more serious issues when switching between video and desktop (via ALT-tab). This would freeze the video.
So I reverted as well to the previous driver and all is fine.

[pgman]

I had problems defining a custom resolution that I have been using for a long time...

That's basically the same as my issue. I normally run 18xx X 99x resolution to my television (to compensate for overscan) and I couldn't do that at all with the 260.99 drviver - it forced 1920 X 1080 on me, which was not a huge problem, other than the OTA HDTV being over-scanned more than I'd like.

I am guessing that, the reason I couldn't do the custom resolution was because the HDCP handshake wasn't working. I don't know if that is also the cause of the crashing or other very bad picture issues I was seeing - the video would freeze while the audio played on, then both my monitors would flash rapidly and eventually Windows Aero would shut down, usually followed by a BSOD and reboot.

On the reboot, the OS wouldn't finish loading. It would go just so far and the BSOD again. Then, on the next reboot, I had to enter safe mode and uninstall the driver. It was ugly.

I have new hardware (less than three months old), other than my video board (which I transferred from my old system) but I am going to wait to upgrade my video hardware now. If nVidia are starting down the road of poor drivers, I will be inclined to look at Intel or ATI again when I upgrade. I don't game on this machine, so what I have now is probably overkill anyway. A more powerful video board really isn't necessary, I don't think.